


Rushlight.

by orange_crushed



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Force Dyad (Star Wars), Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mythology References, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, That's Not How The Force Works, The Force, Unless Maybe Somehow that Is in Fact How the Force Works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:08:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21974857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: Rey tries to join in, but finds herself too drained to keep up. Instead she stares out of the shuttle window at the skyline, watches the descending sun fall behind the glittering black towers that go on and on and on. Studies her own unsmiling face in the glass.This is exactly the kind of moment, she thinks, that would have connected us.
Relationships: Finn & Rey (Star Wars), Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 163
Kudos: 726





	1. Chapter 1

A little while before they hit atmosphere the pilot looks over his shoulder, glances a second too long, and opens his mouth. And shuts it again. Rey waits, but doesn't ask. She's not especially interested in another conversation right now. Her forehead feels like a giant, heavy bruise. Mostly she's just listening without judgement to the grinding noises coming from the compressor coils and thinking about whether the transport canteen will going to have anything but portions tonight. If she’ll even be hungry, regardless. After a space of time that she doesn't quite track, the pilot flicks the landing gear out, and then he says, with a casualness too casual to be real, "So, they're really gone?"

"Hmm?" she says, snapping back. She was drifting. It happens a lot with head injuries; surprise, surprise. "Who?"

"The, uh," he says, and falters for a second. One of the stabilizers is locking up a little; it whines as it's forced open. It grits her teeth. "The First Order.”

“Yes,” Rey says. She closes her eyes for a second, rests her temple against the seat. “Well, mostly.” They’ve been ferreting out little cells here and there: escaped officers hiding out under assumed names, mini-fleets hiding in the nebulas, outer rim outposts where they’ve been keeping a toehold, largely by blocking offworld signals so the locals won’t rise up. Once the signals get through, well. Rey’s been feeling less like a Jedi and more like a mop, the last few months. Just scrubbing off whatever grime she finds. “They’re finished in the core,” she says. “And they don’t have long, anywhere else. They’re not coming back.”

“Good,” the pilot says. His voice is a little tight, still. “And, the, uh.” He falters, and Rey opens her eyes. She unfocuses, reaches out, lets herself sink into the current of force passing between them. His aura’s uneasy. It’s hard for him to voice this, whatever it is. “And the knights?" he says, eventually. "Of Ren."

Rey can't remember his name; someone on the radio from command had given it to her, as she was shuffling others onto the local evac, but she'd been knocked against a bulkhead less than an hour earlier and he was the ninth person she'd had to introduce herself to in twenty minutes, so that piece of information had fallen out again as quickly as it'd gone in. He's been kind to her, letting her sit up in the cockpit where she could see the blurring stars, instead of making her lie in the windowless med ward with three delirious, occasionally snoring pollen victims and an Ithorian with a broken leg and a good attitude who kept trying to start up a card game. And his flying is good. Kind and competent: Rey’s favorite sort of person, really. She watches him thoughtfully while he settles them onto the landing pad and flicks the docking controls into place. They have to radio in for a skiff, pickup for the other patients. But Rey's in no hurry. Her shiny new shuttle's in pieces, and Alliance transport's not arriving for another hour or so. She can spare him a moment.

"What did they do to you?"

"Not to me," he says. Now he won't look at her; anywhere but her. He studies his own hands, resting in his lap. "My family. On Akiva, a few years back. A settlement there, they," he trails off. "They were hiding a Resistance messenger, so."

"I understand," Rey says. She really does. “I’m sorry.” He turns, searches her face. His gaze is haunted, anxious. He looks as if he could use a good night’s sleep. They probably all could: Rey doesn’t know anyone who isn’t still having regular nightmares of one kind or another. Hers are of falling ships, of lightning, when they're not of other things. "They're all gone," she says, finally. 

"You're sure?" he says. There are deep lines around his mouth, at the corners of his eyes. He's a father, she realizes. Or he was. She doesn't have the heart to ask which. It's right there on the surface, easy to pick up if you're skimming for thoughts, or if you're just tired enough not to have boundaries anymore, like she is. She hopes he'll have someone to go home to, tonight. Most people aren’t built to be alone. "You're certain?"

"I am," she says. "Ben killed them all for me."

The minute she says it, she wishes she could pull it back in, at least the last bit: the pilot's brows furrow in confusion, then lift in surprise. It'd be funny if it didn't make her skull feel like it was freshly splitting in two. There are things most people still don't know about that fight, things she hasn't shared with just anyone. And normally she doesn’t, except again: her head. She should have known better than to try and take on a diplomatic job by herself. If Finn or Kaydel were here she might not have picked a physical fight with the cheap gangsters this world was calling a security council, and even if she had it would have been over a lot more quickly with another solid fighter at her side. And of course if she hadn't started in, then nobody would've called command, and then maybe said cheap gangsters wouldn't have gotten nervous and tried to quietly destroy a cargo of bootleg pol pollen three decks below where the talks were being held. Thank goodness she brought one of Poe's pretty, official-looking planetary shuttles instead of the Falcon: the explosion took out half of the entire docking bay. She can still smell burnt wiring. Her face hurts, and she's honestly just too tired to focus and work on healing. She'll get a cold bacta pack and a hypo for the pain and go to sleep on the ride home and hopefully start over tomorrow. And in the meantime, she should really stop talking about Exogal. 

"I thought," the pilot starts, and Rey groans a little and rubs at her temples. Then she tries to give him a version of a smile that Finn's called _disarming_. Poe calls it her _bantha shit_ smile. He would know. By necessity, she's been getting better at it.

"I'm just so tired," she says. "My head's killing me. Sorry, what were we talking about?"

"Oh. Oh, nothing," he says, hurriedly. Embarrassed. Vulnerability will do that. She feels a brief stab of sadness, at knowing just how to quiet him; a small shame that it worked so well. He clicks on the comms. "Med alpha, this is evac. I've got five stables in need of pickup." A voice on the other end confirms. And then he sits in silence for a second, while Rey gathers her things and gets herself unsteadily out of her seat. "Thank you," he says, when she’s halfway out of the door, an apologetic half-smile still fading on her face. "Whatever happened out there. Thank you."

Rey just nods. She's learned in the last few months that there is nothing she can say, when people do this: nothing that sounds right, or feels right, coming out of her mouth. They do it to Finn and Poe, too, sometimes. All three of them have agreed that it feels strange, like an ill-fitting coat that friendly strangers keep trying to drape over their shoulders. It's kindly meant, of course. But sometimes it feels as if all they did was stay alive. Survive. It’s hard to be thanked for that. 

"Thanks for the ride," she says.

“May the force be with you,” he says, with deep sincerity in his voice, and turns back to the controls. Rey bites her tongue and goes. 

On the landing platform she helps the Ithorian and the pollen-sick onto the skiff and then lets herself be helped onto it in turn, riding backwards away from the ship. When she leans her head back onto the padded rail there’s only sky above her, an endless luminescent orange band turning gold at the horizon. The atmosphere here is slightly thinner than she's used to, and cooler than Yavin or any of the other places she's stayed in the last restless year. The air in her lungs feels like swallowing snow. There’s a flock of white plongeese high above them, their wings making bright flashes against the sunset, flickering lights like sparks falling from a torch. The flock turns and wheels in patterns that meet and collapse outward, scattering in the wind and returning, like the spray of a wave. Their aliveness touches hers, wakes her a little, in a way that’s different from the cold. The force is there, in them, and here also, in her. It sits against her ribs, in her fingertips. All of it, everything: the force, and the thrumming life-pulse of the universe; the others who came before her, in a thousand sleeping generations. They’re all there inside her, around her. Inescapable. Intrinsic. _May the force be with you._ She could no more be without it than without her own heartbeat. It’s always with her. And she's so grateful. There were many moments where she was afraid, afterwards: afraid to reach out. Afraid of what she'd connect with. Afraid of what she wouldn't.

Finn comms her after the hypo but before she falls asleep on the return ship; she lies in the dark of her borrowed quarters and listens to his voice with her eyes closed.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and in the same breath, “What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” she says. She really should stop talking until her head clears.

“Rey.”

“They had drinks brought up to the talks,” she says. She blinks and puts a hand over her face; her eyes are wet, and burning a little. It’s got nothing to do with the bacta patch, or even the hit she took. She feels suddenly, unexpectedly, like sobbing. It happens more often these days, sometimes over things that wouldn’t have squeezed a tear from her a year ago. Or maybe it’s the concussion. “A child carried them in,” she says, and swallows what's rising in her throat. She can hear Finn stop winding up to say whatever he was about to. She tries to keep her voice even. “A little boy with a dirty face. He couldn’t have been more than ten.”

“Karking sons of—” Finn mutters, low and furious. “I knew it. I knew they’d go back on the terms. The Alliance made it totally clear-”

“No more slavers,” Rey finishes for him. “They asked if we were open to—negotiation, on that point.”

“And you gave them an answer,” Finn says. He exhales against the microphone. Rey listens to his breathing. It makes him feel closer than he is. “I’d have done the same thing.”

“I know.”

“Come home,” he says, firmly. “You file your report, I’ll get sanctions moving. And then we’ll get a peacekeepers brigade and go back together.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Rey says. She’s about to say something else, but it ends in a slow, aching yawn.

“Get some rest,” Finn says. There's a smile in his voice. She can sense the feeling behind it, from across the vast miles between them: love. Relief. It warms her, relaxes a knot somewhere in her jaw. She didn't know she'd been holding herself so tensely. “See you when you get back.”

“See you soon,” she echoes, and the comm light flickers off. And then it’s just her in the dark again, her head numb, her body heavy. She ought to drift off now. Let herself start healing. But there’s something still burning in her, an ember she can’t quite smother. Not for weeks now, months. It’s a restless thread she can’t stop tugging. Waiting for a tug from the other end. Feeling nothing. Everyone else feels less than a hair's breadth from her, even at her most solitary: since the battle she's been crowded by spirits, by closeness. By the force. It would be overwhelming, but she's invited it. The opposite of loneliness. But then, still, this. This one absence. The void she can't fill, can't see across. And can't ignore. Can't stop touching. Rey listens, and reaches out, and waits.

 _If you’re there_ , she thinks, into the quiet, _this would be a good time_.

Nothing comes, except for sleep.

Yavin is rich in the force; she knows that’s why Luke chose it, once upon a time. At first it felt morbid to be here, to walk in the ruins of the new temple, but there was something wonderful about it, too, in the way that the force ran through everything, right at the surface: awake and alive and almost tangible. It settled on her shoulders like a soft cloak from the minute she landed. Yavin is a quiet world, but the force is in the sound of the trees and the rushing of the water; at night it ripples and sighs like a breeze, like a faint calling of faraway nightingales, like a body breathing next to hers. It’s easier to meditate here. It’s easier to feel one with the vastness, the multiplicity. It’s full of ghosts, this place. When she’s being especially honest with herself, she knows that’s part of why she chose it.

Between clean-up missions and Alliance meetings they’ve been building a new settlement, or an approximation of one. They’ve knocked down the rickety towers that were still standing and hauled the least-damaged blocks across the grounds to a flat patch of land with a good view of the lake. Moving stones was Finn’s homework for weeks. He’s good at it now. It took some convincing to make him believe and accept—truly accept—that weight really wasn’t an issue. That, Rey understands, is normal for a padawan, or whatever he is to her now, besides her best friend.

“An x-wing,” Luke says.

“You couldn’t lift an x-wing?” Rey says. She pops another seed pod and crushes it between her teeth. “You did for me.”

“Give me a break,” Luke says. “I was twenty. I couldn’t do anything back then without complaining first.” Rey laughs and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “I wasn’t like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tough,” says Luke. 

"You weren't tough?" Rey gives him an incredulous look. "I've heard it differently."

“Nah," he says. "Maybe I got tough later."

“Like raw bantha weed,” Rey says, and cracks up again at the face Luke makes.

“Thanks a lot, kid,” he says, sourly. His gaze softens. “I'm saying, whatever you had to do, you did. My own master tried to get me to see things that way. To stop leading with my doubts."

"You make it sound like I'm so… I don't know. Confident," Rey says, and leans her head back against the block she's resting on. "I'm not."

"Not always," Luke says. "But you know what I mean."

“There's just," Rey starts, and sighs, resigned. It's so much harder to hide what she feels from him, now that he's one with the karking universe. "There was never anybody else. Nobody else to do it,” she shrugs. “If I couldn’t lift rocks, all my friends would’ve died. I didn't have time for doubt.” She draws her knees up and glances away from him, out towards the valley and the long line of trees leading down to the water. “It’s still hard not to think that way,” Rey says. “That I have to do everything myself.” 

"But you're learning."

"I'm trying," she says. "I had a good teacher." She smiles at him again. "And I don't mean you." Luke guffaws, like she's surprised him. She doesn't know if she really can. But it's nice to make him laugh. 

It’s just the two of them, right now: Finn’s asleep on his pallet, bone-tired and dead to the world. She can hear him snoring lightly from inside their little makeshift hut. He fell asleep right after supper, practically in the middle of a sentence. She’s a bit of a hard teacher, she thinks, suddenly. Maybe too hard. She pushes him because she cares about him, because she believes in him, completely. Because she knows how good he can be. How great he _will_ be. But that’s no excuse for wearing him out. People can burn like fuel cells, until they’re spent. She knows. Something for her to think about, when the others come. And they will come. She’s felt it.

“You’ll make your own mistakes,” Luke says. She looks back at his softly luminous face. He’s definitely reading her mind a little. Or her heart. However this works. “You won’t make mine.”

“I could.”

“You already didn’t,” Luke says. “You saw a truth I couldn’t face.”

“Maybe,” Rey says. Her throat thickens; she blinks something in her eyes away. She hates this feeling, but she can’t stop dragging it up again, over and over, turning it to the light. She knows Luke knows. He's just too kind to make her say anything out loud, yet. "Sometimes, I feel like I should've,” she says, ramblingly, and scrubs at her face with her palms. She breathes. Buries the feeling under warm sand in her mind; watches it sink, like the sabers. It helps a little. Just barely. “Sometimes I feel like I’m an idiot,” she finishes, instead, and grimaces. 

“Admitting it is the first step,” Luke says, benevolently. When she throws a seed pod at him, it goes right through.

On a break between meetings at Coruscant, Rey finds a corner behind a potted plant, curls her knees up and punches her jacket into a decent approximation of a pillow, and warns Kaydel and Rose that if anyone wakes her up in less than twenty minutes she'll treat their insides like an old Destroyer.

"I honestly don't even know what that means," Kaydel says. 

"I do," Rose says. She steers Kaydel away by her elbow. "Nighty-night, scrapper."

Rey dreams.

She is back at the pit, and like the last time when it pulls her she goes, down and down, without resistance; she comes up thrashing, soaked to the skin, smelling of deep stale water, cold stone and salt spray. At the mirror she stands motionless. Watches her reflection. There is nothing left here, she thinks. Nothing it can show her. No naked, frightening truth she hasn't faced. Calm and resolute, she faces herself. 

But then, there's a breath against the back of her neck.

 _Hello_ , she thinks, in surprise. She doesn't turn. She can't, somehow. She puts her hand to the glassy stone and a shadow grows around her reflection, behind her; it shimmers like oil, settling into shape. Nearly. It stays liquid, uncertain. But it's there. Waiting for her. _I know it's you_ , she thinks. _Finally. I've been waiting, too_. The breath shivers at her ear. Rey almost laughs; the feeling bubbles inside her like air trapped in water. It's so strange. _I thought you would have come before_. She doesn't say it to be cruel. She could always feel how hungry he was, how lonely. It could have been terrible, that string between them. But somehow it wasn't. None of it made sense and mostly it still doesn't. But Rey touches the cold and formless mirror wall, and thinks, like a reflection: _I feel it, too._

The shadow is close, closer; she can almost feel cool skin against her neck. The fine hairs on her own skin stand on end. Rey stares into the surface, willing the shape to coalesce. To show her what she came to see. _Be with me_ , she thinks. _Talk to me_. But there's only silence, and that heavy, shadowed presence. And… a thread of anticipation. A cold wash of fear. _What are you afraid of? Tell me_ , she thinks, rising a little to an unexpected anger. _I'm not done with you. Talk to me_. But it's too late. As she watches, the shadow begins to pull into ribbons, into threads; there is a hole opening behind her, drawing everything apart, away. Something she can't fully sense, a sucking void. It's tearing at her back now, howling faintly at her ears. It's almost upon her. Rey clenches her fists and whirls and—

"Whoa," Rose says, palms up. "Easy, lothcat." Rey blinks. She's halfway upright with one fist raised to strike; she opens her hand immediately, relaxes, draws back. Several small pieces of furniture thump gently back to the floor.

"I'm so sorry," Rey says. She can feel her face reddening. "I didn't—"

"Nightmare?" Rose asks. She pats Rey's leg. Her voice lowers. "It's okay. We all have them." 

"How long was I out?"

"About an hour."

"An _hour_?" Rey scrambles up, shakes her jacket into a semblance of decency. "We're supposed to be upstairs in—"

"Ten minutes," Rose says. "Yeah, I know. Have a little faith."

"Why'd you let me sleep so long?" Rey grumbles. She doesn't mean to be so snappish, there's just something still clinging to her, unsettled and cold. She rubs her arms vigorously, frowning. Rose gives her an unphased look.

"You needed it," she shrugs. "Besides, for most of it, you were smiling." Rey stops. Stares at her.

"Was I?"

"Yeah," Rose says. "Now get a move on."

They're early to the meeting. It's about trade regulation, supply chain management for the new Alliance. Rey knows she doesn't have an especially informed opinion about those things, but Rose does. Rose has a lot of useful, thoughtful ideas about local control over resources, and Rey comes along to make sure people are listening to them. Mostly, she sits upright in her chair, listening intently, hands folded serenely, definitely not fidgeting or thinking about lunch, and sometimes she interrupts to say pointed things like, "I'd like to hear more from Delegate Tico on this question." Rey thinks of it as a kind of meditation, a focusing exercise for her social skills. It's actually more exhausting than sparring. While it's happening she tries not to make too much eye contact with Kaydel, who's seen her eating stew with her bare hands too many times. Most new people Rey meets automatically assume Jedi are dignified.

The summit's a modest success and Rose is elated on the ride back to their temporary quarters, a refined apartment on a high floor that used to be Leia's when she was on-world. She and Kaydel talk over each other in excitement the whole way, and Rey tries to join in, but she finds herself too drained to keep up. Instead she just stares out of the shuttle window at the skyline, watches the descending sun fall behind the glittering black towers that go on and on and on. Studies her own unsmiling face in the glass.

This is exactly the kind of moment, she thinks, that would have connected us.

It was often that way. Restless, distracted, looking for something. That's usually how he found her. How she found him. She doesn't know if there really was a logic to it, something controllable. Predictable. They never had time to find out. All she knows is that she still has these feelings. She just doesn't know where to put them, now. Now that they don't have an echo. Like a stone dropped into water that won't ripple.

She makes a mistake at Kalante. Their intel was only half right: there was in fact a First Order cell holed up at the old Imperial outpost there. But the outpost only _looked_ like a rickety, out-of-date durashell surface base. What their source didn’t know or didn’t share was that the base had tunnels, miles of them, burrowing below the main shelter and running beneath the landing strips and winding into the base of the closest mountain foothill nearby. They’d sent five ships and about fifty ground troops when they should have sent five hundred. Rey is currently trying to make up the difference.

“Rey!” 

"I'm fine, I'm fine!"

"You don't _sound_ fine!" Somebody is shouting in her left ear, which is ringing a little: the Order troops are bringing down the tunnels here and there with detonators, to cover their retreat. It will probably end up with them trapped in the base like rabbits in their own warren, but that would make them even harder to dig out; if she can get ahead of the blasts and open the bay doors leading down, the Alliance troops can get in and take the base at close quarters. She excels at close quarters, anyway. “Rey, where the hell are you?” It’s Poe, she can tell. Since Exogal only Poe uses that snappy tone of voice with her. 

“Southwest corner,” she gasps, and leaps a fallen piece of the ceiling. “I’m fine, I—hold on!” There’s a trooper with an electrostaff around the next corner who shouts when he sees her and charges forward; Rey launches herself into a forward lunge and meets him in midair, using the momentum of the landing to drive him back. He staggers under her and their sabers burn together, hot and close in the stale air of the tunnel. Rey presses him, then feints and lets him overextend his swing; she draws up and strikes out at his knee with her heel as he passes, cracking bone. He cries out and staggers against the wall with one arm outstretched, then gives a desperate lunge forward, stabbing outward with the blade, but the angle’s wrong and they both know it. She hammers down across him with her saber, trapping the staff against the concrete wall and filling the tunnel with the smell of burning phase emitter. He pushes back but Rey’s found the pressure point, the weakness in the weapon; she forces down hard, harder, and the electrostaff snaps in a shower of sparks. The trooper falls back, stunned, and Rey gives the weapon a kick, out of his reach, as she goes. Sometimes it feels like they’ve gotten out all the electrostaffs they could find since she appeared a few years ago; she sees them everywhere now. “I’m almost to the main levels,” Rey says, cupping her comm with one hand as she sprints on. “I’ll get the doors open, just give me a few more minutes.”

“Are you crazy? You’re gonna get trapped down there!” 

“I am not!” Rey hollers back. The ceiling above her shudders and rains another small shower of debris all around her; she dodges and runs faster, reflecting blaster fire from further on. “I’ve got this under control!”

“Who are you, _me_?” Poe yells, and disconnects.

Rey fights her way to the main bay, but the chaos there is even worse: troopers and officers from across the complex have all funneled themselves there in the hope of safety, or at least strength in numbers. A handful of the Alliance troops have busted through one of the service bays and have an impromptu gunner’s nest set up in the mouth of a tunnel exit; when they see Rey burst through a knot of stormtroopers a cheer goes up and the fighting starts in earnest. For next few minutes, or the next hour, she can’t be sure, Rey doesn’t have time to think about anything at all besides blocking the next blast, the next strike. She knocks down as many as she can, hoping to limit the casualties: Finn’s been talking about working with deserters, prisoners, hoping to start some kind of rehabilitation movement. He’s told her more than once that he left friends behind. So anyone who goes down and stays down, she ignores. 

But mostly she tries to stay alive. 

There’s a blast from above and a shaft of daylight spills into the base, along with a dump of durasteel debris that scatters the crowd; Rey swipes blood and hair out of her eyes and finally catches sight of the manual override panel for the hangar doors, one level above her on a high catwalk. Of course, she thinks. There's always more climbing. Rey ducks and weaves between crates and hauls herself up onto the catwalk ladder, but another explosion rocks the wall and the catwalk shakes loose of a mooring; she flips herself to the next secured section and lands in a crouch, igniting her saber. Two troopers kneeling down on the catwalk, sniping at the fight below from behind a durasteel panel, swivel their helmets in her direction.

“You’re in my way,” Rey says. 

The troopers glance at each other, then drop their guns and scramble upright and sprint in the opposite direction without looking back. Rey stares for a second, then shakes herself and follows them, running along the catwalk towards the panel. A blaster shot soars by her, nearly singeing her back; she wheels and deflects, but another shot clips the wires holding up her section, and the already-weakened struts give way in a wrenching jerk. Rey grabs for the wire but it’s too late, her footing skids away and the entire catwalk collapses like a broken spine along the outer walls, tumbling and breaking apart on the concrete floor. Time nearly stops for a second while she's in freefall, but she's fallen before—many times—and her instincts take over. She spread-eagles, slows herself by grabbing here and there, catching edges to slow the descent; at the bottom Rey softens her landing with a force push and rolls down, but has to turn to redirect the twisted metal dropping like a cage. She's barely fast enough: it skims her arms as it accordions down all around her, screaming metal landing in a burst of dust and dirt. 

Rey lies there for a second, hands still over her head. She does a quick inventory: skull intact. Joints. Limbs. Bones. She’s untouched, but winded and trapped. Rey breathes and pushes herself up off the floor. She peers out of the hulk of broken catwalk, wiping dust from her eyes. A hundred feet above her is the access panel. The bay doors are still shut. Rey growls low in her throat, says something that would’ve gotten her arrested in most Jakku cantinas, then ducks as a spray of sparks from blaster fire scatters all around her. She’s a sitting duck under all this scrap. It needs to get off her back, now. She dips into the force to steady herself, feeling it rise from the shaken ground beneath her, the pounding heartbeats around her, and—stops. 

Stares. 

There’s a shadow against the bay doors, at the far end of the hangar. A strange shadow, both dark and bright. Like a moment of sun behind cloud. She's seen mirages before, in the desert. She knows their danger; the wavering uncertainty of them, the false promise. But there's a weight to it that no mirage could fake. 

_You_ , she thinks. Frozen for an instant in a wild, familiar hope. _You came_. Her heart leaps into her throat. _You came back for me_.

There is no more hesitation: Rey lifts herself off the ground and the tearing struts of metal rise with her, crashing off and scattering in every direction in a cracking, screeching cry. She shakes them from her back like sand, ignites her saber. Three troopers make a run at her, together this time; Rey spins between then and slices cleanly through one of their electrostaffs, like it was a stalk of grass. She throws the others into a handful of their own troops and runs towards the doors, spinning and clashing as she goes, breaking through, faster and lighter than wind. She doesn’t need the access panel. She has everything she needs right here, in her hands, in her pulse, in her dancing feet. She’s not fighting alone. It drums in her ears and her chest, in the breath she measures in parries and feints, the way the ground itself curves gently for her as she runs, the turning of this moon she’s on. There is a song in her ears, rising like sunlight. She can feel the ship engines screaming overhead and the pounding hearts of her own friends as they fire and duck and roll and pull each other out of harm’s way. There is a wind at her back, joyous and terrible and _hers_. 

She is not alone.

She feels everything and nothing: between her strokes she floats above herself, watches the whirlwind of her motion, like a current of the force set free; and then she's back in her body, sweating, straining, grounded by her blood, the grunting exhale as she connects elbow to helmet, knee to ribs. She dodges and zig-zags, tracking the shadow with her eyes as she goes. She loses sight of it only for a moment, when a stormtrooper throws himself bodily at her, locking his hands around her wrists and trying to bring her down. She knees him and tosses him aside with a burst of strength, and looks back. She’s less than forty feet from the hangar doors now, but the shadow’s gone. There’s nothing but blinking safety lights and a couple of terrified-looking officers aiming a hand cannon at her. 

“We’ll surrender!” one of them calls, shakily, and another one clubs them for that. Rey picks that one up and slams him against the wall while the others scatter; she ignores them and reaches out in the force. Reaches for her bright shadow. Her ghost.

 _I saw you_ , she thinks. _Come back._ The battle goes on, clumsily and desperately, behind her. _Fight with me_ , she calls out. _Be with me_. 

Rey pulls harder at everything she can touch, summons the force to her in great handfuls, gathers it like massing clouds suspended in a storm. She breathes and shuts her eyes, reaches down into the earth and up into the sky. Feels the barriers between her and everything else dissolve like rain. _Be with me_ , she calls. But there’s no answer. Rey grits her teeth and tugs, yanks ferociously on the thread, the chain she can almost feel, almost touch, the thin threads that lead out of the world, away from her. Away from everything. Rey pulls and pulls and drags her heels and screams—

—and the massive bay doors crumple in on themselves like flower petals, like rolled paper, like nothing at all. 

The Alliance troops rush in, shouting, and Rey stands still in the middle of that flood and listens to the cacaphony of voices on the comms. They clap her on the shoulder as they pass, praising the force and ducking the guns. It’s over in minutes. A roar goes up when the signal for the surrender is given, and then the base is theirs. 

It’s done.

There's a little more chaos as they clear the lower levels, but once the Alliance ships fly in through the massive hole Rey tore for them, even the holdouts throw their weapons down. For a while she helps gather up the stormtroopers and process them for transport to command. She tries to be kind to them. But she also understands how hollow that must seem right now, in the moments after battle. With their helmets off some of them look like kids to her, teenagers, frightened and defiant, or just lost. Most of them are more than a little afraid of her; others still want to go for her throat. She makes a few mental notes, but after a while she just can’t listen to any more thoughts. She doesn’t have room in her head for them. When it’s time to start moving them in groups to the shuttles, Rey excuses herself and goes to sit out of sight on a pile of crates. She turns the hem of her tunic over in her hands, thumbing at the torn edge. She’ll mend it on the way back, or maybe sometime tomorrow. Or maybe never, she thinks, blankly, and then wonders at herself. There’s something flattened in her feelings, something she can’t quite name. It’s too cold to be the passing of adrenaline. 

“I guess you did have it under control,” Poe says, suddenly, cheerfully, and Rey looks up. She didn’t hear him coming. He’s half out of his flight suit, with a data pad in hand. He looks like he’s about to tease her for a second, and his face falls. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she says, automatically. Poe frowns.

“What happened?” he asks. He leans down. “You look like you were crying.” Rey startles and rubs at her face with her fingertips; her hands come away wet. And dirty. There’s ash and dust on her, everywhere. 

“Fight crash,” Rey says. “It was nothing.” She bends over and wipes her face with the relatively clean inside of her shirt, and straightens up. “Are those the base schematics?” she asks. “You want me to take a look?”

“I did,” he says. “Now I think I want you to go home.”

“I’m alright,” Rey scowls. “Give me the pad.”

“No,” Poe says, flatly.

“What?” Rey stares at him. “Stop fooling around and show me the karking schematics.”

“Can you just,” Poe starts, and stops, and holds a hand up when Rey bristles. “As your friend,” Poe says. “I think maybe you should take a break.”

“I’ve had a break,” Rey says. “I’ve been sitting here for half an hour.”

“I mean a _break_ ,” Poe says. Rey snorts, dismissively.

“You haven’t taken one. Nobody’s taken one.”

“Yeah, I have,” Poe says. It’s startling. Rey feels herself gaping at him a little. “You didn’t notice that I disappeared for a month, right after the Hastoi mission?”

“No,” Rey says, honestly. She searches her memory for a second, struggling to remember what happened between Hastoi and Naboo, between Naboo and starting the work on Yavin, between Yavin and the first new senatorial congress—

“No, I bet you didn’t,” Poe echoes. “Because you haven’t stopped a single day since Exogal.”

“There’s _work_ ,” Rey says. “We’re needed.”

“You can’t fly on an empty tank.”

“You can glide,” Rey says, stubbornly, and Poe’s face actually crumples up with choked-back laughter for a second before he puts a hand over his face and sighs. 

“Leia, give me strength,” he says, in the direction of the ash-marked ceiling. At the sound of that name Rey’s miserable mood falters. She looks at him, her friend. Really looks. At the tired line of his body; the radiant feeling of compassion that he’s animated by. Compassion for her. Mingled with worry, and affection, and a kind of understanding. He’s right. She knows he’s right. She can’t go on like this. Outrunning something that’s inside her. That’s just not how it works. Rey stands up, rests her hand on his arm. Squeezes it a little, maybe. She’s not made of stone.

“Alright," she says. 

"Wait. Really? Just like that?" Rey nods and Poe purses his lips in a silent whistle. He looks back up, at someone Rey knows he can’t see. “Boy, General," he says. "You work fast."

"Oh, switch off," says Rey.

.


	2. Chapter 2

“I’m going with you,” is the first thing Finn says. Rey smiles at him, but shakes her head. She knew how this conversation was going to go before it started. But she also knows how it has to end.

“You can’t.” 

“I have lifted like, a million rocks today,” Finn says. “Try to hold me back.” He puts both of his fists up, gamely. “I’m ready for anything.”

“No, that’s not—that’s not it, you _clanker_ ,” she snorts, and cracks up helplessly as Finn aims punch after punch at the open sky over their heads. She rolls into the grass beneath her and lets the laughter run through her like little waves. It’s wonderful. 

They’re lying on their backs by a campfire, sore and satisfied after a long sparring session and another round of boulder-building. It’s recently dawned on them both that while they might in fact be decent Jedi learners, they’re fairly poor engineers. Pretty soon they’ll have to get someone else in here to advise them, if they want any of these structures to stay up for long. Chewbacca’s been no help, either: when he’s here and not with Lando, which is less and less, he’s mostly down by the lake, sitting in a wicker swing and snoring. His major piece of advice was for them to find a cave and live there. Poe says he’s in retirement, whatever that means. 

“ _I’m_ a clanker?” Finn says, mock-affronted. “Whose crooked little hut did I just rebuild? Huh?”

“Your own, probably,” she says, and whacks at him with the back of one hand. He pretends to take the hit and die dramatically, limbs flopping over into the weeds. “Oh, get over yourself,” she grins. “I’m not saying you can’t. I’m saying you _can’t_. Poe needs you. He told me at debrief that he’s got a line on some sites for trooper resettlement. And maybe a funding stream. He wants you to meet some people, talk to them. You know the project best.”

“That’s true,” Finn says. He rolls over onto his side, props himself up on his elbow. Considers her. “There’s something else, though,” he says, with the uncanny clarity that he has, now, too. “Tell me.” Rey swallows. 

“The people he wants you to talk to, some of them, they’re… parents,” Rey says. “Parents of children who were taken.” Finn goes very still. “They’ve put together a kind of network. You know Jannah and Lando were digging into it, but Poe says they’ve come back with a lot more than they expected. Hundreds and hundreds of families. Every day they’re getting new messages.”

“Do you,” Finn says, haltingly, “do you think—”

“I don’t know,” Rey says. “But there’s a chance.” Finn rolls onto his back again, looking upward. “I think you should go talk to them. I think you should try. You know I know what it’s like,” she says, softly. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I know.” He reaches for her hand, without looking; without looking, she takes it. “I’ll still go with you, if you need me to.” And she knows he would. R'iia, but she loves him.

“No, I’ll be fine,” she says. A little more breezily than she really feels. But she’s slightly better at hiding her deeper emotions from him than he is from her. Just slightly. And that’s not going to last forever. The way his training is going, it feels like she’s barely staying one lesson ahead. “I’ll be more than fine, knowing that you’re—that you might find something.”

They lie in near-silence for a while, listening for the small snaps of the twigs burning cheerily in the fire; for the crickets all around them in the tall grass, for the frogs below at the edges of the water. Rey drifts, unfocusing her eyes to take in the spill of stars above them. Yavin’s constellations are thick with points of light, complicated shapes that she’s tried to memorize from their ancient tablets. They’re all animals and plants, humble but elemental forces: no wonder, for a planet that teems with life, that’s filled to bursting with it. And with death, too, she knows. Everything has a cost. Everything has an answer. She was right to come here, she thinks. To try again. This place deserves its second chance. 

She wonders, sometimes, what Luke really thinks about that. If he minds being drawn back here by her presence, reminded of things he can’t change. He hasn’t complained. If anything he’s visited more often than she expected, at least once every few moons or so. Maybe it’s the teacher in him resurfacing. Once or twice when they’ve been together he’s pointed out particular stars for her. Told her their stories, their secret names. She forgets now and again, how many years of his life he gave to this place. How well he must know this view. He probably used to do the same thing she’s doing at this very minute, when he was not much older than she is. It’s a humbling thought. She never imagined herself following in anyone’s footsteps, really. Never imagined much of anything for herself, beyond getting to fly one day. Getting to escape her old life. But here she is, sort of. 

“Wait,” Finn says, suddenly. Rey refocuses on him. He’s making a thoughtful face. “Technically, if I use the force, I could be in two places at once.”

“Not unless you want to join it permanently,” Rey warns. “Don’t even think about it.”

“Hmm.” 

“Absolute clanker,” says Rey.

Chewie takes her as far as Endor; from there she says she’ll take an x-wing and a refitted BB droid. Chewie argues with her all the way into the hyperlane and back out of it again, but after they land he becomes strangely withdrawn, monosyllabic. He puts down the landing gear and hovers listlessly around the ramp while she packs up her bag and meets him outside.

“It’s not forever, for goodness’ sake,” Rey says, and leans up on her toes to kiss him on the top—well, on the side—of his enormous furry head. “I just need to take care of something. Myself.” Chewie groans at her. “I don’t need the Falcon for this,” she says. “I’d rather leave it with you and Finn, in case there’s an emergency.” Chewie roars. “I’m not planning on it, no,” Rey says. “Look, it’s just a—a meditation retreat! Honestly. You’re being unreasonable.” Chewie wilts. Yowls at her in a long string, sadly. Defeated. Halfway through his sentence, she can actually feel the wave of fresh misery coming off him; it hits her like a wet washcloth. Rey stops. She’s never pictured him terrified, but he is. Terrified, and lonely. This great incomparable giant, who’s outlived nearly all his friends. “Chewie,” Rey says, taken aback. She throws her arms around him. Hugs him fiercely. She’s been so thoughtless, she can’t believe it. “I’m coming back,” she promises, into a faceful of fur. His giant, ropey arms go around her, holding her tight. “I’ll come back just fine, I swear it. Please don’t worry.”

Chewie pets her shoulders with his massive paws. He doesn’t let her go for a long minute. _You’d better, kid,_ he tells her, in a growl, in a voice and a cadence that’s nothing like Han’s, and yet is so similar that it leaves her blinking back tears. 

“I’ll be back soon,” she promises again as he releases her. She gives him a conspiratorial grin. “In the meantime, maybe you could teach Finn the difference between the fuel _injector_ and the fuel _dump_.” Chewie barks twice, throwing his head back. “No, it’s not,” Rey says, sweetly. “Nothing’s impossible.”

The BB unit they find her is serviceable and upbeat, if not as quirkily charming as Poe’s, and the x-wing is a recent refit, so she finds herself flying in relative style. She’s made sure to take beacons with her, at Finn’s request. The only thing she hasn’t done is filed a flight plan. If they ask her about it, she’s just going to say that she forgot. In reality it’s the opposite. She doesn’t have any idea yet where she’s going.

But she knows where to start.

Rey stands on the landing pad at Ahch-To and lets the spray of the waves hit her face, soak her poncho. She’s been standing there for an hour or so, while her BB unit does cross-checks and parses the system maps. It seemed like it needed something to do. What Rey needs to do right now is nothing, she thinks. She needs to let herself be more like the foamy tides that are battering the rocks below her feet; like the sharp breezes that whip up the sides of the mountains and whistle through those silly little cone huts. Like the grass and stone that soak up daylight. Empty and willing, a simple conduit for the force, rather than a conductor. Rey turns her face up to the light and breathes slowly through her nose and out her mouth. She needs to listen without desire, without need. To exist without demanding anything, seeking anything, without worrying or doubting. 

The waves crash. The wind blows. Rey tries to do the same.

“Good kriffing luck,” she sighs to herself after a while, and decides to drag her bag up the hill. 

She takes Luke’s old hut, since it’s the best-outfitted, and looks to have been recently cleaned. It still doesn’t have much of a door, but there’s nobody here to bother her besides the fishwomen. She’s not worried about crossing paths with them again: from the flurry of disgruntled cries they made as they saw her stepping out of the x-wing, they’re not planning on coming anywhere near her. The old village was already emptying when she arrived, though there were still a couple of left-behind cleaning tools, some abandoned rags and baskets. “Thanks. Lovely. It’s mutual,” she mutters when she sees the backs of them, scattering along the paths leading down the cliff. She leaves their brooms propped against the outer wall. 

That night in her dreams it’s almost impossible to tell whether she’s awake or asleep; she’s lying on her side on the hard pallet in Luke’s hut, the way she was when she first drifted off, but now there’s a fire going that she didn’t light, a blanket pulled across her that she didn’t bother reaching for. There’s a warm weight at her back. In the dream—if that’s what it is—she knows, somehow, that she shouldn’t turn around. _But I want to_ , she thinks, heavily. The hot glow of the fire has made it difficult for her eyes to focus, so she lets them slip down, half-shut. _I want to see you._

 _No, you don’t,_ the shadow says, deep and hollow, from behind her on the wall. It flickers in the firelight, stretches to the ceiling.

 _Don’t tell me what I want_ , Rey thinks, distantly mulish, fading quickly along the border between sleep and oblivion. The shadow curls across her; dips greedily into the hollows of her neck, the penumbras carved by flame and darkness, the brighter edges traced by light. _Where are you_? she wonders, drowsily, with a hand curling against her throat. It feels strangely intimate, though there’s no touch but her own. _Why won’t you come back_?

 _I can’t,_ it says. And then, lower: _I shouldn’t._

 _Oh, kark yourself,_ Rey thinks. At the edges of her vision the shadow shakes with the trembling firelight. It almost feels like a laugh.

In the morning Rey still needs to meditate, so she goes to the tree. Or, what’s left of it. She didn’t see this last time; she was barely on the island half an hour before Luke summoned the ship for her and she went right off again. Now she stands with her hands fisted in her hair, turning slow circles to take in all the damage. For the millionth time since she first met Luke she feels totally insane.

“ _What_ in the kriffing—master _Luke_!” she hollers. “What did you _do_?”

“Oh, he didn’t tell you about that?” Leia says, wryly, from somewhere behind her. “How unlike him.” When Rey turns she’s there, resting against a low stone wall, her hands folded into her sleeves. She looks younger than the last time Rey saw her in life; younger but now ageless, too. Her wrinkles and laugh lines haven’t faded, they’ve just… eased. There’s a softness in her face, but the fragility is gone. Rey wonders if this is how she might have looked in a life of peacetime; if the last decade of her existence hadn’t been so marred by war. Rey’s throat tightens, to see her this way. She’s just so beautiful. Rey can’t remember her mother very well beyond flashes, faded sensations, but Leia—in this moment Leia contains all the gentleness and loveliness she’s ever known. “Don’t stare like that,” Leia says, while Rey’s still gaping like a bushfrog. “I’m starting to get worried about how bad I actually used to look.”

“No, no,” Rey says, and hurries to her side. She sits down close to Leia with her knee out, facing her, trying to drink her in; she feels like a starflower, chasing her light. “It’s just—it’s just so good to see you,” she says, and stretches out her hand. Leia covers it with her own, hovering over her with an insubstantial brush of radiance. Rey feels a sensation like pins and needles, and sees something, a flare of something: a dark forest, a kiss. Drums and firelight. Joy. And—grief. Fresh grief, and old. Leia smiles at her. Rey pulls back, apologetically. “That’s yours,” Rey says. “Sorry.”

“It was for you,” Leia says. “I wanted you to know something. About Luke. Can you see him, in that memory?”

Rey closes her eyes. Concentrates. She lets Leia guide her, moving between the great trees, towards the smell of woodsmoke. There is a clearing and a pyre, and— _Luke_ , Rey thinks, now seeing him clearly. His hair’s so light it’s nearly white, burnished to copper by the flames. His face is young. As young as hers. As Finn’s. It puts an arrow in her heart, that face. He is all in black, like the body in the fire. She’s never seen him that way: in his sober clothes he’s nothing but a thin shadow against the smoke, upright and still. His eyes track the fire. They are glossy, red-rimmed. His mouth trembles.

“He’s—”

“Tell me.”

“He’s alone,” Rey says, without opening her eyes. She can’t look away from him, this spectre of a boy she never knew. “Why is he alone?”

“Who else would mourn Vader?” Leia says. It startles Rey out of her reverie; the forest vanishes, and she is here again on the island, tasting salt. Leia studies her. “You want the truth, don’t you?”

“Yes,” says Rey. Leia knows her too well. It’s a reflex: her character, her curse. She’s wanted truth all her life. It’s brought her almost nothing but pain. But she goes on wanting it, regardless. 

“I never mourned him,” Leia says. “He was never a father to me. Too much… history. It was different, for Luke.”

“Did he ever—”

“A few people,” Leia says. “But mostly he kept it to himself. Luke never expected anyone else to feel the way he did. Not even me. Vader saved his life. Nobody alive could have seen that coming,” she says, and shakes her head. “But Luke… Luke believed. He trusted there was something worth saving. And he was right. In his own way, Luke was right. For his sake, Vader became someone else. Someone more like the man he should have been.” 

Rey can’t meet her eyes anymore. Can’t look at Leia’s face; can’t even look at her own hands, knotting in her lap. Heat is building in her face. She can’t control it. She’s not entirely certain why. A fat tear, hot as blood, trails down her cheek. She scrubs it away but it’s too late: more are rolling down her face now, faster than she can stop them. 

"Sorry," Rey says, "I'm just—a little tired, that's all."

"Rey," Leia says. "What are you afraid of?"

Rey's chin is trembling. She covers her eyes in shame and a single buried sob breaks free of her, horrible and ugly and too pathetic to bear. 

“I can’t,” she says, thickly. 

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t mourn—him.” Rey says. “I can’t even say his name.”

“You can, if you want to,” Leia says, softly, and Rey chokes a little around a swallowed breath. "There’s nothing you need to hide from me. He was my son," Leia says. "I miss him, too."

“But _I_ can’t,” Rey says. She shoves it down, brutally, but it won’t go this time. It won’t. It sticks in her throat, in her mouth. “I know what he was,” Rey whispers, and her heart lurches. “Everything he was. But nobody else—they love me, I know. I know they do. But they wouldn't understand, nobody understands.” 

"Do you think that's true?" 

"I know it is."

"I never cried for Vader," Leia says. "But when my brother needed to talk, I listened." 

Something in Rey cracks at that, a dam she can't hold, and she sobs again, then harder, until she’s bent in half with the heels of her palms pressed over her eyes. Tears are a waste, she thinks at herself, furiously. Tears are a good way to dehydrate, to die alone. All those years she didn't cry, wouldn't cry, and now she's just going to—fall apart, come to pieces like this? Over one death, when there's been so many, so many more than she can even hold? Rey muffles herself in a circle of her own arms, willing herself back under control, but it doesn’t happen. She can feel Leia’s incorporate hands stroking her back, running currents of the force along her spine. It helps but it’s also just a reminder of what’s gone, what’s lost, what’s never coming back, and now it only makes her cry harder, like she’s a child again, a stupid friendless little child, full of helpless longing. She hasn’t cried like this for so long and she can’t let herself. Not for him, not for them, not for anyone who isn't coming back. She can’t, but she is. She can't stop. "Let it out, child," Leia says. "It's alright. We're not meant to bury the things we feel. We're people, not tombs."

“He came back for me,” Rey weeps. “I needed him and he came, he came back,” she gasps. “And I can’t feel him anymore, I can’t feel anything. I can’t—I can’t breathe,” she says, and slides down until her back is to the stone wall, until her hands are pressed hard over her heart. It’s racing; her whole body is trembling. 

“Rey, sweetheart,” Leia says, from above her. “It’s okay. Breathe. It’s alright.”

“It’s not alright,” Rey cries. “It’s not alright. I’m a Jedi! None of this is right. I shouldn’t feel this way. I’m—wrong. I’m all wrong inside,” she says, and weeps again, more weakly this time. She feels a great well of sorrow drain through her, overflowing, spilling away, until she feels empty. Wrung out. Rey wipes her face again, tries to slow her breathing. “I’m a Jedi,” she says again, her voice shaking. She looks up at Leia, who is watching her with worried, tender eyes. “I don’t think I’m supposed to feel like this,” she says.

“Oh? Leia says, archly. "How _are_ you supposed to feel?”

“One with the force,” Rey says. “Calm. Peaceful. I’m supposed to—accept things. Life,” she says. “Death.” Rey closes her eyes again, shudders in shame. “I still have his clothes,” she admits. She hasn’t told this to another living soul, but now it just falls out of her, like scattered sand. She doesn’t look at Leia. “I took them with me, I was going to—leave them somewhere, like the sabers,” she says. “But I didn’t. I didn’t.” Rey’s mouth trembles, but no more traitorous sobs come out. She's cried out her river. She feels dry inside, like bones.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Leia says.

“Yes, there is,” Rey says, grimly.

“Rey,” Leia says. “You’re a Jedi, yes. A true one. And a person. You have a heart. I hope I didn’t teach you that those things are incompatible.” 

“No,” Rey looks up at her again. “No, of course not.”

“Your heart is one of the reasons why we’re all still here,” Leia says. Her beautiful, crooked smile quirks up a touch. “In a manner of speaking.” It coaxes a thin answering smile out of Rey. It’s enough to make her wipe her face again, sit up. Pull together a scrap or two of her dignity. “Do you trust them?” Leia says. “Your friends?”

“With my life.”

“Try trusting them with your soul,” Leia says. Rey doesn’t know what to say. “Just some friendly advice.”

“Thank you,” Rey says. She remembers herself at last, and inclines her head. “Master.” 

Leia waves a regal, dismissive hand at her.

"You don't have to call me that anymore," she says. "You've graduated. You're the master now."

"Really?" Rey says. "Is—is that how it works?"

"Sure," Leia shrugs, and Rey lets out an only _slightly_ hysterical giggle. Leia winks at her. "I wasn’t a very good Jedi, you know."

From a deep sleep Rey sits bolt upright and stares out across her banked fire, through the half-open doorway of the hut. The little room is boiling hot; she's been sweating and she's kicked the blanket off sometime in the night. Her BB unit, powered down in the corner, wakes with a chirp, but she quiets it with a gesture and tries to summon back the dissipating fog of her dream. She had it just now, clearly: she had the piece she's been missing. The thing she couldn't understand. Couldn't keep hold of. Rey focuses. Follows herself backwards. When she sees it, it's like sensing dawn, just before it comes: feeling the first wavering light that will cut across darkness.

 _I miss him too_ , Leia said.

 _I can't_ , said the voice in her dreams.

"Ben Solo," Rey says aloud, for the first time in nearly a year, and the wind rushes up the cliffs and through the cracked door, shivers the fire, raises goosebumps on her skin. But it's only the wind. 

Ben, Rey thinks. Where the karking hell _are_ you?

.


	3. Chapter 3

There are plenty of places she might go to pick up the trail of Kylo Ren, Rey thinks. Mustafar, maybe. Korriban. Other Sith worlds where Snoke could have taken him for training. Indoctrination into their histories. But if she wants Ben, she'll have to take a different approach.

There's a house she's seen once or twice before in Leia’s memories; just a flicker shared between them, a gift of trust, during one of the many times that Leia patted her shoulder or held her tight or swept her hair up into some kind of complicated knot for a bonfire night, on one of the few occasions that the Resistance had anything to celebrate. There were a couple of weddings, a birth or two. Life went on, the way it always does. When Rey closes her eyes now she can see it again, a house of fluid spires and gables emerging from the trees beside a long shimmering canal. The canal descends from the hills above the house, originating at a waterfall. In Leia’s memories she is standing out on the veranda at dusk, rocking a child to sleep to the sound of falling water. There’s a kind of absolute peace in that memory, a wholeness and sweetness Rey isn’t sure she’s ever really known. Whatever he became later he was only Ben in that moment, in Leia's arms.

She doesn’t know what’s happened to that house, if it’s still standing. But she thinks she has to start there.

Finding a landing pad in Theed is easy; as soon as she transmits her codes for planetary clearance she gets half a dozen invitations to dock in private hangars, a dozen more heartfelt messages of welcome that make her face heat with embarrassment. Naboo’s been one of their best allies at the negotiating tables over this past year. Their new queen is Rey’s age, and though they’ve only met in passing Rey’s come to appreciate her skills in speech-making, so different from her own. She doesn’t want this to seem like an official visit, but in the end she does take a bay at the quiet end of the old palace hangar. Mainly because she knows it’s well-stocked; it’ll be easiest for her to borrow a speeder here without attracting much attention. Of course, one of the queen’s personal guardsmen comes down to greet her anyway, and when she asks about local transport he tries to get her to accept a slim hypershuttle and driver for as long as she’s on-world. 

“No, thanks,” says Rey. “Really, it’s too much. Just a little speeder will do.” She gets a fresh one with a full tank and the royal crest marked on the saddle leather, but at least she can drape her bags over that and not feel too ridiculous. Her new BB unit chirps sadly at her as she mounts the speeder bike and adjusts her goggles. “I’ll be fine,” she says. “Stay here, keep the ship ready. I don’t plan on staying the night.”

Some of Leia’s family kept a manor near Varykino, Rey learns that much from asking around a little bit; but from the descriptions of the place, the house Leia and Han used to visit as new parents wasn’t the same one. She thinks about calling out to Leia, but in the end she just settles herself on her speeder and inhales, deep and slow. She listens for the lively movement of water, the pulse of the falls. Runs her hands along the railing of the veranda in her mind; Leia’s hands. A little tug comes to her senses. A tug and then a pull, a line drawing taut.

There, she thinks. 

She opens herself fully to the force as she rides along the canal road, winding her way out of Theed towards the lake country, following the feeling in her gut, turning here and there as she’s nudged in one direction or another. The ride takes a little more than an hour, and Rey finds herself enjoying every minute of it. The morning air is cool but the rising sun is warm on her back; the rushing wind in her face is like drinking from a stream, and her body relishes the purr of the speeder beneath her, the way it hums smoothly through the turns and dips. It’s a good machine with a strong engine, nothing like the pieced-together desert bikes she’s more used to. It’s got more power, but then again, she’s got better control now; when she clicks up the speed she can feel herself tense with excitement. She takes the corners a little too fast. Rey rides up, up towards the low green mountains, follows a cut trail up to a flattened hilltop, where a house is perched at the edge. It’s a beautiful old country house lined with sunstone tracery and wrapped with white ironwork verandas; as the sun comes over the hill it turns every edge and railing into radiant lines that curl and weave together into one spiraling shell. Rey stops the speeder at the end of the long drive and stares at the house, a little overwhelmed. A house of light, she thinks. People were happy here. She’s too focused on taking it in to notice, at first, when the side door at the bottom of the main staircase opens, and someone pops their head out.

“Who goes there?” somebody calls. Rey peers down the drive and sees a figure wrapped in a hood and scarf, wearing goggles and a long dusty pale cloak. They’re brandishing a staff. Rey dismounts and walks towards them, cautiously; her saber’s at her side, under her light cloak. As she gets closer Rey almost laughs out loud at herself: the staff’s not a staff at all but a dusting pole with a feathered end. The hood and goggles are covered in cobwebs. The figure shakes the pole at her again. “This is a private house,” they warn, and now the voice is just familiar enough for Rey to place it. They must be having the same sensation in reverse, because the figure in the doorway suddenly stops and drops everything, pulling the goggles and hood away from their face. It’s Larma, with grime on her cheeks and her pale hair looking like a bird’s nest. “ _Rey_ ,” Larma breathes, delighted. She stretches her arms out and Rey runs into them, smiling broadly. “Rey!” Larma squeezes her and then holds her at arm’s length, hands on her shoulders. “Oh, you look well. How wonderful to see you. Is everything alright? We didn’t expect you.”

“We didn’t expect anyone,” comes a second voice, from the cool shadow inside the hallway. It’s Wrobie, with her dark hair pulled up on top of her head. She pulls the bandanna away from her neck and reaches out to shake Rey’s hand but Rey hugs her as well, and Wrobie claps her hard on the back. “A nice surprise, though,” Wrobie laughs. “What are you doing here?”

“I,” Rey says. She grins, suddenly feeling a little awkward. “I don’t know, exactly. I just know I needed to come.”

Wrobie and Larma look at each other.

“Where have we heard that one before,” Wrobie says.

“Just like Leia,” Larma sighs. She takes Rey by the elbow. “Come on in, then, don’t stand on ceremony with us.”

The house is cavernous by Rey’s standards, though Larma assures her it’s one of the more modest homes in the district. The furniture and mirrors are covered by dropcloths, and there are scrubbers and rags and dust-poles everywhere. “It’s a work in progress,” Larma says, as they march her up the stairs and through the welcome halls, the grand parlors and receiving rooms. After what seems like forever they finally come to a massive set of glass doors leading out to the main porches; they’re stained and grimy but Rey can still see light beyond, outside. Wrobie throws them open and the room is flooded by warmth and sun. It’s glorious. Rey steps out and fills her lungs with clean, flower-scented air. Her muscles are still humming from the ride up; between the smell of water jasmine and the warmth and energy rushing in, it’s like every nerve in her body has come to life. Was she really so exhausted? So held-back? She can’t remember the last time she felt quite so—lightened. “It’s something, isn’t it? Or it will be again,” Larma says, over her shoulder. Wrobie’s standing next to her with an arm around her waist, grinning. 

“It’s wonderful,” Rey breathes.

“Just another few miles of dust, is all,” Wrobie says. Larma elbows her, gently. “Ow.”

“Take it like a fighter pilot,” Larma says. “Rey, dear, can we get you anything? Are you hungry? We’ve got cold sandwiches and caf. Plenty to share.”

Rey’s stomach rumbles.

“Um,” she says. “Yes, actually. Please.”

They eat sitting outside on the stone porch, with the sandwiches unwrapped on their knees. It’s the nicest meal Rey’s had in days, and she takes her time with it. While she chews and savors the herb cheese and fresh bread, they tell her what they’ve been up to since last year, about Larma leaving the Warlentta armada for good, about Wrobie taking temporary leave from the new Alliance fleet, all their most recent travels together. About the house. Apparently it’s been sitting empty for almost fourteen years. Nobody’s had time for it.

“Leia always wanted to come back here someday,” Larma says, wistfully. “The way she talked about it, it sounded like paradise. When the war was over, I found out she’d left it to the planetary regent’s board. They’re going to turn it into some kind of resettlement site. And I thought, well. Why not send it off looking its best? I could at least do that for her. Give it a fresh start.” Larma gives Rey a sad smile. “She was one of my best friends.”

“I know she’d appreciate it,” Rey says.

“I always remember Leia at the battle of Hastoi,” Wrobie says. “The first one. Remember?” Larma nods. “We were getting shelled for an hour before the transport could break through the line. All of us were sweating through our jumpsuits, but Leia?”

“Not a hair out of place,” Larma says. “Oh, some people might think that’s frivolous,” she adds, to Rey. “But it just made us fight harder, seeing her so unflappable. She gave us hope.”

“Nobody kept her cool in battle like Leia,” Wrobie says.

“I certainly don’t,” Rey sighs. Wrobie laughs.

“Hey, I’ve seen you fight. Just a little bit,” she says. “And that was enough. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

After lunch Rey drifts into a light meditation, sitting with her arms around her knees on the big porch, basking in the early afternoon sun; Larma and Wrobie exchange a couple of knowing glances, with the simple telepathy so many long-time couples share, and leave her to her thoughts. She can hear them now and again, working in the house behind her. She ought to just get up and help: it would probably do more for her concentration than this. But it’s so pleasant to sit here, and the house is laden with so many memories that she barely knows what thread to begin untangling. When she closes her eyes and rests her palms against the stone she can feel small running feet. Small _wet_ running feet. She can hear a woman’s bright laughter, a man’s answering call. There are other things, too: slammed doors. Pacing steps. Loneliness. But the biggest feeling of all is just—togetherness. For better or for worse, a closeness, a shared way of life. All the pieces of a whole linked together, in a chain that anger and guilt and death and distance still haven’t entirely broken. They are fresh here, still; raw; despite the layers of dust and the scent of time’s decay. Rey wonders at it. The strength of it. 

She wanders the long hallways, following her feet, sometimes following those small footsteps, to one tower bedroom and then another. One of them must have been his, she knows. But most of the furniture’s missing, and most of the walls are painted the same pale sky blue. It’s hard to tell where anything was with any certainty. There is one room that feels like Leia’s; there’s a dressing table against the far wall with a covered mirror, a set of silver hairbrushes left behind carelessly. Rey picks them up and sneezes, then beats them against a dustcloth for a while. Leaves them where she found them, just a little cleaner. She is going back down the hallway to find Larma and Wrobie when a sensation stops her in her tracks. Something like a resonance in the back of her skull. Rey closes her eyes and pictures him. It’s been so long since she saw his face, but he comes back to her with perfect clarity: his big curving shoulders, the light mottling his skin. His intent eyes. The way he’d stooped to her, always, to meet her gaze. She forgets for whole moments at a time, in what’s now her regular life, how strange it was to have had half of him that way. To have had half of someone else’s feelings, which were so like your own, and yet so unknown, so different. How strange to know that they were getting half of you, too. A part of yourself you barely recognized, reflected through them. _Ah_ , he’d said, looking into her. _You do_. 

Rey puts her hand against the wall, at a seam in the panel, presses her fingertips in, just so. A little door swings open.

Hello, Ben, she thinks.

There’s a circular staircase in the wall that leads to one of the towers she saw, the first time she came around the drive. The room at the top is little more than a hidey-hole, big enough for her to pace about ten full steps across, and no more. There are tall windows on three sides, with a spectacular view of the lake and the isles and even some of the bigger manors and the ancient forest lands on the far side beyond it. Rey opens one and lets the high breeze in, and the stale air instantly freshens. She sits up on her knees on a low padded bench, her arms resting on the windowsill, thrilling in the good air and the dazzling height of the panorama that spills out below her.

A pilot. She knows he wanted to be a pilot. Join the club, she thinks. But she can see why he’d think of it, even aside from Han. It’s easy to imagine yourself soaring above the treetops from here, picturing yourself dipping the belly of your skimmer onto the lapping currents of the blue lake. It would be easy to see ships coming in from Theed, or to the local landing pads. Easy to see them going, too. She thinks about her broken Rebel helmet, still sitting in the sand somewhere at the feet of her old AT-AT. The storms have probably covered it all over. Buried it without a trace. 

There are star routes painted on the wall, common hyperlanes. Rey follows them with her fingertips. He’s not here. She knows that now. She had to see, for certain. She can feel the echoes of him here, in things that belonged to the boy he was. But the man she knew isn’t haunting this place. He isn’t on Naboo at all.

Rey shuts the window and goes down the winding steps. She closes the hidden panel door after herself. It’ll be our secret, she thinks. She’s sure some other enterprising child will find it one day, pull it open. But for now she’d rather nobody else disturbed it. She finds Larma and Wrobie in the kitchen, scrubbing fixtures and bickering cheerfully about whether to take, donate, or trash the crate of old portion packets.

“Those never go bad,” Rey says. She makes a face. “I mean, they’re already bad. So what could happen.”

“Told you,” Wrobie says. “I’m going to have one for dinner, you watch me.”

“More pie for me,” Larma says. She smiles back at Rey. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay longer? It’s not all dirt and drudgery here, I promise. We’ve got most of the western half cleaned, and a bedroom set up in the old study. We could easily make you up a nice pallet.”

“No, that’s alright,” Rey says. “It’s time for me to move on, I think.”

“Did you find the tower stairs?” Wrobie says, surprising her. Rey hesitates. “I can’t, for the life of me. I can see the windows from the drive, but not a single one of the staircases go all the way up.”

“Oh,” Rey says, vaguely. “How odd.”

“These old houses all have their tricks.”

“Better you don’t find it,” Larma says. “You know what that tower looks over. If it faced the east, that might be something. A nice spot for a reading nook, maybe.”

“What does that mean?” Rey asks. Larma looks at her, nervously. 

“Never mind,” she says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“It looks over the lake, I thought,” Rey says. She checks herself. “I mean, it would. From that direction.”

“Not the lake,” Wrobie says. “What’s on the other side of it. The old Palpatine estates.”

The bottom drops out of the floor.

“What,” says Rey. She’s—spinning, somehow.

“Oh, catch her, catch her,” Larma cries, and Wrobie grabs Rey’s arm just in time to steady her before she staggers over. “Rey, are you alright?”

“I’m,” Rey says. “I’m—fine.”

“I’m so sorry,” Larma says. She glares at Wrobie. “Did you have to say that name?”

“You brought it up!”

“And I regretted it immediately,” Larma says. “Rey, here, sit down.”

“No, I’m okay,” Rey says. She is again; she smiles thinly and stands up straighter, with one hand still on the edge of the long stone table at the center of the room. Wrobie lets go of her arm, reluctantly, but stays close. “It just surprised me,” she says. “To think that would be—here. Of all places. Naboo is so—”

“It’s strong in the light, Leia always said,” Larma nods. “Who’d have ever thought a Sith could rise here? It’s one of the reasons nobody ever suspected him, back in the bad old days. I really am sorry, dear. I know you really faced him. So few people ever have. I can’t imagine what that was like.”

Rey floats above her body for a second, fighting a feeling that’s between grief and hilarity. Faced him, she thinks. She certainly did. She wonders what Larma and Wrobie would think of her if they knew the rest: the truth that Luke and Leia buried for her, the secret Finn has pledged never to share, even with the friends they’d trust anything to. Rey wonders if they’d run screaming out of the house. Try to fight her. It’s a crushingly lonely thought. Is this what happened to Luke? She wonders, suddenly. To Leia, to Ben? Their whole family lived with this—imprint. Did it feel like this? Did they ever sit across from their friends—people they loved, people they trusted—and wonder? And doubt? 

She used to wonder why Leia spoke so little about her son to other people. But it’s obvious to her now that it was about more than pain: it was strategy. There were rumors, still, floating around the Alliance canteens: Ben Solo died as an apprentice, targeted for his power by Kylo Ren. He was still alive but living as a meditating hermit. He’d fled like Luke, to finish his training, and died heroically somehow. Leia never tried to correct the stories, contain them. She’d kept her silence, kept her grief to herself. Rey understands that she was hedging her bets: keeping his name as clean as she could, for the day he might need it again. For a time when he might be drawn back to the light. Leia never gave up hope, but she also never showed all her cards. Rey used to think that was a little bit like cheating, but now, well. Rey would be the very last person in the galaxy to blame her.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Wrobie says, kindly. Rey shakes her head.

“I do, actually,” she says. Rey takes a deep breath. “Please. Tell me everything you know about that place.”

The Naboo are a peaceful people, largely by choice and by culture; their habits and values are rooted in water, the group responsibility of managing it. They understand intimately the connection between individuals who share a source of water; they are keenly conscious of the power that shifts as things move from upstream to down. Maybe they weren't always that way, she doesn't know, but so many wars have left their mark on Naboo's consciousness, that much seems clear. Rey's found their diplomats to be largely kind and conscientious, even in the long torturous slogs of Alliance meetings where everyone talks too long and too circuitously. She’s found through a little skimming that the representatives from Naboo are usually actually listening to everyone, instead of only pretending to be.

There is no evidence of that intrinsic peacefulness here. Rey stands at the end of a long duracrete causeway leading up to a demolished gate that curls like twisted metal vines. The gate is as tall as a building; it must have once been toweringly grand, a gilded splendor designed to provoke awe. But what it really looks like is a mangled corpse. Even the broad causeway itself is scarred by blaster fire, by deep gouges that could have been made with staves and swords, or with farmer's tools. With rocks. Beyond the broken gate is an untended forest, wild and gnarled. 

"They destroyed everything they could," Larma told her, back at the house. "The people did, as soon as the Empire fell.”

“Didn’t want more Sith coming for relics,” Wrobie had added. “His family house was burned. They laid duracrete over the site. There’s nothing there now.”

“There are some things,” Larma corrected, thoughtfully. “The Emperor liked to make a big show of his benevolence here, on his homeworld. His estates were going to be the center of a new capitol district, so he had palaces and gardens built there. Schools. Even foundling houses." Larma had shuddered. "I don't know if any children ever lived there, but what a horrible thought."

"Horrible," Rey had echoed. With the taste of ashes in her mouth.

“Anyway, some of those things are still there. Ruins. Nobody wants the land, of course. The Naboo have given it back to nature.”

And nature has taken it, Rey thinks, standing at the edge of the causeway. There are vines choking the collapsed gate, like knotted fists. Moss and wildflowers fighting their way up through the duracrete. She walks slowly along the uneven road; she’s left the speeder at the opposite side, taken only her sling bag and her lightsaber. When she reaches the gate she looks back, and a glint of sunlight catches in her eye, almost painfully. Far across the lake, on the opposite end well past the forested islands of Varykino, there’s a tiny pinprick of light, a flash from where the sunset is hitting a piece of glass, a sparkle. It takes a second for Rey to realize that it must be a tile on the tower of the little hillside house; Ben’s refuge. Rey’s throat closes for a second. Her gut churns. Leia told her once that he was only a boy when the nightmares began, the first time he heard a pale voice in his dreams. But even if Leia hadn’t, Rey would have known: she’s been inside his head, after all. She’s seen his haunted corners. Rey looks back at the gate, the broken paths beyond it, the dark close trees. Her hands clench, itching for her saber, but there’s nothing to fight. Nothing but her own despair. The rage brimming in her heart.

Is there anything you haven’t touched, haven’t taken? she thinks, pain and fury watering her eyes. Anything you haven’t poisoned? 

Thankfully, nothing answers. 

Rey inhales and gathers the light to herself. Crosses the gate. She makes her way through the trees, which grow close together in thick knots, blocking out the sunlight with their canopy. It’s colder here. The warmth of daylight slips away, and Rey walks on, careful not to catch herself on the broken ground, the clumps of brick and marble that are being slowly turned up by roots. After almost a quarter-mile the trees thin out, separate for what must have been a great ringed drive, a place for shuttles and speeders to pull up in front of a grand manor house. There’s no house, just pulverized white pebbles that might have once been a marble staircase, and then beyond it a giant rugged crater of poured duracrete overgrown with vines and punctuated by sapling that have grown through the cracks. They must have blasted it from the sky, Rey thinks, to sink a hole that large. It’s ten times the size of the little house on the other side of the lake, maybe even bigger. Rey looks out along the tree line at the edge of the nearest cliff: with the brush cut away there would have been a fine view of the water below. It must have been a magnificent house, especially lit at night: like a blaze of light rising from the forest. Now it’s a dead place, dulled of vibrancy: so many of the trees around the house are scrawny and half-bare. That’s what happens when you subject good soil to pulse blasters, Rey thinks, tiredly. She’s seen it many times before. 

There are knocked-down structures at the far end of the crater; it takes Rey a good ten minutes to pick her way safely across and around the hole. More tangled metal and crushed stone and tile. They might have been garden structures, courtyards, at the back of the house this way. Rey catches a snatch of a song as she runs her hands along the sheared-off railing. Music, she thinks. Pavilions for music. 

And it’s that, out of everything, that stops her in her tracks.

He had all this, Rey thinks, dumbstruck. He had a whole life here. A _family home_ , she thinks, blankly. Parents. It hits her like a clap of thunder, like touching the wrong end of a switch. She knew very little about the Emperor before: only that he was a tyrant who rained death and destruction on half the known galaxy. She’s never imagined this. A beautiful house in the wood, on a green world of light and laughter and dancing. Dancing, and music. There was never much music on Jakku: drums and singing, sometimes. Cheap tinny radios, when the dust storms didn’t block the signal. But this? Nothing like this. Not ever. 

None of this was enough for you? Rey seethes. No, of course not. Some people can never have enough. It wasn’t enough to be rich and powerful and never have to scrub junk for portions, never have to burn your hands on hot durasteel while you climbed hand-over-hand to find a single spark coil, a handful of cabling? No, you had to own the kriffing world. And you had to be cruel about it. You had to take the world and crush it, grind it down under your boot. Rip apart families. Destroy lives. Squeeze the world until it bled. And people treat scrappers like trash, Rey thinks, furiously. But no scrapper ever did anything like this. Scrappers were just people, trying to live. There was no shame in work. There was only shame in causing unnecessary pain, delighting in it, laughing with your horrible putrid maw open while other people suffered and died—

Rey picks up a rock and heaves it into the crater, just to hear the sound as it bangs and jolts down to the center. “ _You_ were the trash!” she shouts, and a couple of birds startle up out of the ragged trees, squawking. She flings another rock, and another, to hear them crash against each other. She's sweating in the sun, heaving bigger and bigger rocks overhead without even touching the force for help: it's just her raw hands and her straining back, just her. Just her and a kind of clean-burning anger, a rage at the injustice of it all, the needless cruelty, the mindless stupid _wastefulness_ of him, of all the ruins he made. She can feel something loosening, a band around her belly that’s been holding her in so tight she didn’t know it was there. “You had _everything_ and you wasted your whole kriffing _life_ on _nothing_!" she cries. Rey yells once, wordlessly, and hefts up another rock. "AND I’M _NOTHING_ LIKE YOU!" she screams. Rey throws it and then lets go completely and screams with her head back, her arms open, her chest heaving, her face to the sky. She screams and screams and screams.

The last rock bounces and skips and finally lands. The birds circle and resettle, noisily. Rey stands there panting, wiping her face with her sleeve. And then there’s quiet. She feels like she's run up a mountain. And then maybe fallen back down it. Lovely, she thinks, lightheaded. Very becoming of a Jedi. 

But some part of her feels better. She’s not sure why.

Once she’s away from the crater the trees are healthier; the sun peeks through them here and there, dappling the floor of the forest with pebbled light. Rey swings her arms as she walks, pumps her legs. Feels herself breathe. 

This is still a beautiful place, she thinks. There’s still good in it. Things grow here: things will always grow. For all his power and all his violence, that’s something he could never stop.

Before she heads back down to her speeder, she finds a trail that curls along the hillside and follows it. This path is less marred by debris than the other roads on the grounds. There are little hedges along the sides of the trail; when Rey examines one she realizes it’s a frogberry bush. Frogberries! she thinks for a second, delighted, until she remembers where exactly she is. Her stomach rumbles demandingly. Are you serious, she thinks. More rumbling.

“This doesn’t bother you?” she says, out loud, to herself. “Eating frogberries off the kriffing Emperor’s hedges?”

Apparently, it doesn’t.

Rey pops a handful of them into her pocket and munches them as she goes, little bursts of sweet-sour on her tongue. At the end of the trail is a low sunstone building, a two-story house built to curve against the hill, with little evenly-spaced windows overlooked a long, terraced lawn. The remains of a lawn, anyway: it’s overgrown with wildflowers and shrubs, but Rey can still make out the shape of it. There are stone statues dotted across it here and there, though they’re equally overgrown and indistinct. Rey pulls some vines off of one: it’s a crude, simplified depiction of a smiling lothcat. Its surfaces are smooth, worn down, but not marked with blaster fire. These were worn down by time, by hands. She looks back up at the building. Dormitories, she thinks. They remind her of Alliance barracks, the kind of temporary housing she’s been shuttled around in endlessly over the last few years of fighting and then building. Worker’s housing, maybe. But she looks back down at the grinning lothcat, and suddenly, she knows. Her heart sinks.

The doors to the dormitories have long since collapsed on their hinges. It’s nothing for Rey to push them in and make her way through the halls. The ceilings have old watermarks, from decades of leaks and rainy seasons; there’s a bulbous spot in one corner that’s slowly trickling water, ready to burst. But the paint is still a cheerful pale yellow throughout, beneath the vines and grime of neglect. Most of the furniture is gone, but what’s left confirms what she already sensed. She turns over a chair onto its wobbly legs. It’s far too small for her to sit in. Children, she thinks. The foundling-house. The Emperor’s overflowing kindness towards the orphans he created, she thinks, bitterly. Nothing good can come from her exploring this place. It’s time for her to leave. She turns on her heel to go—

—and Rey hears something.

“Hello?” she calls. She stands perfectly still and listens. The rainwater dripping down fades away. 

_Rey_ , someone says.

She moves into the hall, following it, straining not to breathe too loud, to disturb too much debris. She follows the sensation through the hallway and up the crooked, unsturdy stairs; her foot pops through a board and she lifts herself up, jumps the last steps. Listens. Walks softly across the hallway to a closed doorway. Rests her ear, her cheek, against it. _Rey, sweetheart_ , she hears. _Don’t cry._

“ _Adda_ ,” Rey breathes, in Teedospeak, and pushes without thinking: the force throws open the door for her and she rushes inside, heart pounding. She hasn’t said that word in so long, but she when she was small she used to repeat it over and over as she fell asleep, part of her childish mantra. _Adda. Taata_. Come back. “Adda,” she says, into the empty little room. There’s nobody here. Just a dirty carpet, an overturned little shelf. She touches the walls with her hands, turns circles in distress. “Dad,” Rey says, desperately. “Dad. I heard you. Speak to me.”

 _Don’t cry,_ the voice says. _It’s okay. You’ll be okay._

“Please,” Rey says. She doesn’t know what she’s asking for. “Dad, please.” 

She steps forward; her foot nudges something small.

Rey kneels down and brushes dirt and broken tile away from the bit of—something on the floor. Her hands tremble as they find the edges of it. It’s a little circle of wood, smaller than her palm, stained and dirty. Rey rubs it with the end of her tunic and reveals a glinting little eye made from a glass bead, a faintly striped body. It’s a little carving of a lothcat, like the one she was drawn to outside. The lothcat has one eye open and one shut in a wink. Its tail is curled around its nose. It’s soft to the touch, like something that was carried constantly in a pocket, turned over and over in a tiny hand. She cups it in her own hand, against her heart. This was his, she thinks. This belonged to my father. “Dad,” she whispers. 

She doesn’t even know her parents’ names.

She listens for a long time, kneeling on the tile. But the voice doesn’t come again. It’s said what it has to say. She meditates anyway, reaching for it, and waits until the sun sinks down, and the little room fills up with shadows. But they’re only normal shadows, nothing more. She can hear frogs and nightingales outside, calling, courting. Life moving on.

The Emperor had no heirs. She’s checked. All the official records confirm it: the man who was Palpatine left no legal children behind. So she doesn’t know how her father was born. From secret love, or—from coercion. Or from a cloning tank. There are ways. She’ll probably never know. But he was here, once. Here, among the foundlings. Easy to hide. Easy to watch. His nursemaids were probably cultists, loyalists. Or maybe they were decent people had no idea who he was. Who they were feeding, rocking to sleep. Rey wonders if they were kind to him. If they were kind to him, the way she faintly remembers her parents being kind to her. It’s all she has of theirs, besides the pain of their leaving. She was held and comforted, once, a long time ago. Her hair was smoothed back from her face and her face was kissed. They must have been so afraid, all the time, she realizes. Afraid of him. Maybe even afraid of her. But all they ever were was kind. 

Rey tucks the lothcat into her wrappings, under her tunic, against her heart. It warms quickly against her skin. This is her legacy, she thinks. Her real inheritance. There are tears running down her face but she's not sad, not exactly, or not only: she's just so full of things that she can't bear it. She can't believe she found it. Can't believe it would be here, of all places. This is who I really am, Rey thinks. 

I'm loved. 

Rey drops off the little speeder off a few hours before dawn. The guard at the hangar startles awake when she pulls in and rubs his eyes before jumping up to give her a wobbly salute. Her BB unit rolls up behind him, chirping wildly, and knocks him in the ankles on its way to her. Rey stifles a smile and bends down.

“Told you I’d be fine,” she says.

“I have instructions to take you to the palace for a formal reception when you arrive,” the guard says. Rey lifts her eyebrows.

“It’s not even sunrise,” she says.

“Well,” the guard says. “They expected you back earlier.” Her BB unit makes several impolite noises. “Which is completely fine,” he adds, “Master Jedi.” 

“Tell them I parked the bike myself and slipped past you,” Rey says. “I’m not really fit for a reception at the moment.” She really isn’t: she’s dirty and has pine needles stuck in her leggings, mud on the soles of her boots. Her hair’s coming undone from the wind of the return speeder ride. She doesn't even want to talk about how her face looks. All she wants is to fall down where she’s standing and go to sleep. Maybe take a real shower. Maybe _sleep_ in a real shower. 

“Eh, you look okay,” the guard says, all informal friendliness, glancing at her up and down, and then he flushes bright red. “I mean, you’re—completely presentable, ma’am. Your ladysh—I mean, Master Jedi.” Rey has to hide her laughter in a cough. 

“Thanks,” she says. “But honestly, I just need somewhere to kip for a couple of hours. Is there an inn close to here?”

“Master Jedi,” the guard says, drawing himself up to his full height, which is about four inches shorter than hers. “If I let you stay at an _inn_ tonight, my captain will feed me to a lagoon shark. Please, follow me.”

Rey and her droid spend the night in one of the lower guest suites, after putting her foot down about absolutely _not_ waking up the keymaster of the royal household to open up the diplomatic wing. Honestly, she can’t imagine those rooms could be any better than the one that they give her: it’s spacious and filled with plush furniture, with a real fresher that feels like standing under a waterfall and a balcony that has a high lookout over Theed’s merchant district. When she opens the double doors she can see that the night market’s still bobbing with lights and activity even at this hour. Rey scrubs herself from head to toe and then steams herself a bit longer, wraps up in a plush robe, and sits on the balcony for a while with her feet up. From this height there’s barely any sound from the market below, but the lights are lovely to watch: like luminescent fish swimming far below her in dark water. She falls asleep in the chair until her BB unit chirps her gently awake again so that she can drag herself to bed. 

In her dreams she is standing again in the ruin of the dormitories, with rain falling through the ceiling, rain pounding on the windows, drowning out the rest of the world. She is alone and not alone. Rey lets her eyes slide half-shut in the dream and feels a hand against her cheek: it’s her own hand, but that hardly matters. There is a shadow in the corner of the room, like a crouched man, but there’s nothing really there at all.

 _Do you remember_ , she asks. She cups her jaw, presses her fingertips to her own mouth. _Being loved_?

 _Barely_ , her shadow whispers.

 _I’ll remind you_.

 _I'm not meant to remember_ , the shadow sighs. _They'll make me forget._ Rey opens her eyes. The shadow shivers.

 _I’m stronger than they are_ , Rey says. _And I’m coming_.


	4. Chapter 4

There is, she realizes after several very long unpleasant minutes of almost-consciousness, someone knocking on the door. 

Rey grumbles, sits up, smooths her hair down, gets out of bed, and makes her way safely to the doorlatch. She pauses with her hand on it, trying to remember what day it is, what time it might be. Her own name, and so forth. Her dreams were so thick and confusing that she feels like she’s traveled across the galaxy in the night and left half her brain on the other side. Behind her, her BB chirps and rolls curiously towards her feet. 

“Nope,” Rey says. “No idea.” She opens the door.

“Master Jedi,” says a tall, slim woman in a deep-blue gown. “I am Ylanda, keeper of the keys.” She inclines her head in a slight bow, and pretends not to notice the state of Rey’s—everything. “You honor us with your presence. Did you sleep well?”

“Like a switched-off luggabeast,” Rey mutters, and then recovers herself. “Yes, I slept very well,” she says. “Thank you. Please thank the queen for her hospitality.” Ylanda inclines her head again.

“Her majesty would be very grateful if you joined her for a light, late supper at the eighth bell,” she says.

“Tonight?” Rey says. She shakes her head. “I’m very sorry, but I can’t stay that long.”

“You can’t stay another hour?”

“What?” Rey says. She glances at the heavy curtains, pulled shut against what she thought was morning light. “What time is it now?”

“We have just passed the seventh bell,” she says. Rey only barely restrains herself from saying ‘kark’ aloud. 

“Uh, yes, then, please tell her I’d be delighted,” Rey says. She looks down at herself, still wrapped in the fantastic robe she was wearing last night. Then she looks around the floor at the dirty, discarded pieces of her clothes that she tore off on her way to the fresher and didn’t bother to even put in a pile. Her BB unit must register the grim face she’s making, because it starts backing away, rolling over her pants and trying to tug her boots under the bed with its clamp attachment. Great, she thinks. Truly she must be the most gracious guest they’ve ever seen. “I realize this might be an odd request,” Rey says, and gestures at herself, “but do you think—”

“Something to wear to dinner? It would be my pleasure. I’ll have a few options sent down.” 

“Thank you,” Rey says, relieved. Ylanda nods, all professionalism, but her eyes sparkle a little. She leans in.

“You’re not the first Jedi to stay in these rooms, you know.”

“Really?”

“Master Skywalker visited Naboo many years ago,” she says, and smiles. “He honored our queen Castia with a visit. I was only a new attendant then, but I remember him well. And his apprentice.” Rey tenses up in surprise, but Ylanda doesn’t seem to notice. “The apprentice stayed down here, of course,” she adds. “Master Skywalker was brought up to the cascade suites, the queen insisted,” she says, and then says something else about the view from the upper floors, but Rey doesn’t quite catch it. Of course, she thinks. He’s everywhere she goes, just out of reach. She feels like a tracker that’s lost sight of its quarry, only to find footsteps again, imprints. Signs. She’s just fallen a little too far behind. “I have heard that you studied with Master Skywalker,” Ylanda says, which cuts Rey’s musings short. She looks eager. “Is that true?”

“For a little while,” Rey says. It’s not the biggest lie she’s ever told, not even close. “Do you,” she says, hesitantly, “do you remember anything about the apprentice?”

“A very tall young man,” she says. “Dark-haired.”

“Ah,” says Rey. “We’ve met.”

Dinner with the queen goes much better than expected: first of all, it’s only the two of them, with a couple of handmaidens hovering at the fringes of the dining room, and so Soora’s foregone most of her elaborate makeup and styling in favor of a set of red satin robes and a simple hood and coronet. Next to her in a plain blue trailing gown—the least complicated of any of the things they sent to her room—Rey doesn’t feel quite so underdressed. Supper is simple too, a series of cold salads and trays of fruit and cheese and bread, but there’s a lot of everything and Rey doesn’t hold herself back. She’s starving. She eats as slowly and as politely as she can, but at a steady pace, while Soora fills her in on some of the local politics. 

“And how is your friend?” Soora asks. “I believe her name is—Rose Tico?” she adds, with an artful casualness, and Rey hides her smile in a mouthful of bread. It’s no secret between senatorial delegates that the queen of Naboo is quietly obsessed with brilliant, outspoken, champion-of-the-people Rose. The only person who doesn’t seem to know it yet is Rose herself. One of these days very soon, Rey is going to have to just tell her. 

“Rose is very well,” Rey says. “She wants to form a special session next month, a summit on interplanetary labor regulations. There’s too many discrepancies in policy, she says.” Rey puts a sliver of pink cheese into her mouth and chews it thoughtfully, trying to remember exactly how Rose had phrased it, to make it seem so straightforward. “Why should workers in the outer reaches be subject to credit skimming and collaring, when the same kind of workers on Coruscant have guild protections against those things? We’re all trading together now, aren’t we? One big market?”

“Yes,” Soora breathes, her eyes alight. “Absolutely. Our guild representatives on Naboo would be very eager to join such a discussion.”

“We would be very grateful to have your support,” Rey says, honestly. They need Naboo, and more friends like them.

When she’s finally able to make her exit—and get her own clothes back, cleaned and pressed—Rey and her BB unit load up the x-wing and take off over Theed, just as the sun finally lowers completely. The city is a map of light, a teeming hive. Rey is almost sorry to hit the hyperdrive and watch it disappear. She;s not the only one: when she sets in the new starmap, her BB raises up a loud hail of protests. “I know,” she says. “And I’m sorry, but that’s where we’re going.” 

Naboo is a place of life, lush and vibrant. But maybe she’s not looking for births, for beginnings. She’s looking for rebirth. For transformation. Her BB flashes warning lights. “Definitely not,” Rey says. “But I have to.” She punches in coordinates, steels herself. It’s not going to be an easy ride. She’ll have only her memories and the force to guide her.

I’m coming, she thinks. I’m coming back for you.

Exogal is just as she remembers it. A real karkhole, Rey thinks.

There is still a lashing storm at the planet’s surface that screws with her descent; for a tense second it looks like she’s going to dip too low too fast, but Rey pulls them up in time and only lightly skids the landing gear in a half-circle, tearing up some of the pads. For a minute she just sits in the x-wing and takes deep steadying breaths, while little showers of hail and debris skitter periodically down across the cockpit shell, whipped up by the winds. Her BB unit is in mild hysterics behind her. 

“It’s alright,” she says. “It’s okay. Stay here.” A burst of sound and light again, a notch louder than the last time. “No, that’s not why. There’s just this big—there’s a big lift, thing, and I don’t know if it’s still working. You want me to float you the whole way?” Another beep. “ _Really_?”

The big lift thing is not, in fact, working anymore. “Kriffing son of a kark,” Rey says, standing at the edge of it with her hands on her hips. “Well, there’s got to be another way down.” The BB unit chirps agreement. There’s climbing rope in her bag; she hammers an anchor into the rock a little ways from the mouth of the pit, and loops the rope around her BB unit, who beeps concern at her during the entire process. “You weigh more than I do, I think,” she says, “so this’ll probably work.” She kneels down. “Just, you know. Try to stay fairly still, and if I start falling,” she trails off. Bites her lip. “If I start falling, turn the beacons on and call Finn. Okay?” Affirmative beeps. “I’ll take a beacon too, just in case.” She pats its head.

Rey wraps her hands, and descends. 

She’s halfway down, her forearms aching, when a butal wave of vertigo runs through her, thrumming in her head and wrenching her stomach; the floor below her spins and Rey turns on the rope frantically, trying to regain her hold. She skids and catches it, slides down painfully a few more feet, and hangs there for a moment trying to clear her head. The atmosphere this low is oppressive, heavy and dank. She felt it last time, too, but something’s changed. Last time there was a presence, a kind of crackling electricity: vicious and sharp, a throbbing awareness like the lingering feeling of a burn. But now there’s just a pounding density to the air, a sensation like Rey’s being dragged down, down, by her feet. Rey inhales and focuses and keeps going, landing with a soft thump at the bottom. The rope dangles above her and then jerks twice, lightly. She can see a little flashing light over the edge of the pit. Rey gives an answering wave. 

There are shadows everywhere, down here. Rey walks through the darkened caverns with her saber ignited to light her way. The battle above must have shaken the planet more than she realized. Everywhere she looks there’s pieces of columns and those enormous hooded statues, cracked off and fallen: crushing machinery and tanks, lying across the walkways and blocking her path. The last time she was here she was hurrying through the complex as fast as she could, drawn by that painful string to the very depths, the strange pit, the… amphitheater that they made their stand in. This time Rey stops and looks over the dead instruments, the shattered panels. Something smells unbelievably terrible. Rey unloops a piece of her tunic wrappings and winds it around her nose and mouth; it only barely helps, but it’s something. She steps carefully across a field of broken glass, turns a corner, and runs into a wave of putrid stench so powerful that it doubles her in half. Rey grabs at her midsection, her face, and then pulls aside the cloth to retch on the floor at her feet, gagging even after she’s dry. She holds a hand over her mouth, stomach roiling. It’s a pile of cloned bodies, broken from their wrecked tank, spilled out and rotting. Rey thinks she sees a face like Snoke’s amidst them, countless mangled white limbs. Whatever they were being incubated in has run out over the floor, soaking the stones; a chemical smell rises from the corpses. It’s too much. Rey backs away and sprints on through the massive corridors until the smell fades a little, then stops and tears a bit off her tunic. She wipes her mouth, her chin and neck, and tosses the rag away. This place is a charnel house, she thinks, and goes on.

It dawns on her, as she examines what’s left of a few machines and monitor panels, that many of them have been methodically destroyed: cables cut, memory units torn out. The pieces that weren’t crushed by falling debris have been stripped for parts. Or stripped for something else, she thinks, darkly. She wasn’t exactly thinking about salvaging intelligence on her way out, last time. Or about destroying it. But now it’s all she can think about. This was a place of secrets. Sith secrets. Terrible things were done here. Powerful things. She should have made sure this place was scoured, wiped clean of its terrible capabilities; she should have come back as soon as her friends were safe, instead of hiding from it, hiding away from all of it—from the pain and the fear, the shame. The grief. Maybe if she’d told the truth, the whole truth, her friends would have listened. They would have helped her do this. She wouldn’t be here alone, the way she’s always been alone. She wouldn’t be here in the dark, despairing and frightened, without a single—

“Oh, no you don’t,” Rey says. She stops, stops everything. Stops her mental circling. Breathes. Closes her eyes. Stretches out her senses for something, anything. Anything to link herself to. Anything to feel. It’s a struggle. This is a dead, deadened world. 

But there’s not, entirely, nothing. 

There’s never _nothing_ , Rey thinks. She finds it: finds the pulse in her own ears. The solidity of the rock under her feet. The prickling feeling of the small hairs on her arms. She summons up the sound of laughter: Finn’s. Her own. The warmth of sun and the coldness of water, Rose’s shriek as she jumps into the lake on Yavin; Chewbacca’s hug. Leia’s hand over hers. Ben’s smile, her hand warm on his cheek. A fingertip against his, in firelight.I am not alone, she thinks, fiercely. I am never alone. 

_YES, YOU ARE_. The voice is somewhere in the bowels of the planet, in the thick air crushing down on her, but close by her side, too; just out of sight when she turns her head. _YOU ARE ALONE_. She can feel a great maw of darkness breathing against her back: a sucking heaviness, a hunger that could swallow worlds. It staggers her for a second, but she clutches her saber, raises it up. Focuses on the light in her memories, the feelings of joy and— _AND SADNESS_ , the voice hisses. _AND GRIEF._ Rey sees pictures in her mind, a shower of images she can’t stop: Han falling. Leia fading. A cruiser jolting into the sky, against the sun; a cruel hand tight on her arm, dragging her away. Ben’s shirt in her hands, stained and empty. A blood-red line burning across the stars. _YOU WILL LOSE EVERYTHING_ , it says. _UNLESS_.

“Unless what?” Rey calls out. Her own voice echoes against the walls. “Unless I join you, serve you? You’ve tried that already.”

“You weren’t meant to serve,” says the same voice, softer, closer. A figure steps out of the shadows, one she’s seen before. A girl in a dark hood. Her pale, cruel mirror. “You were meant to rule.” 

“You’re not real,” Rey says. The girl with Rey’s face throws her hood back. She ignites her saber and slashes at a nearby column, cutting it cleanly in two: the top shears downward and topples over in Rey’s direction, forcing her to leap aside while it throws up a cloud of grit. Rey wipes it out of her eyes and stares, horrified. The red saber hums wickedly in her twin’s hand. “I destroyed you,” Rey snaps. 

“How could you?” she laughs, in echo. “I am you.” She lifts her blade and Rey runs for her, swings her saber up in a twisting arc that puts all her bodyweight behind it, but her double sees the move coming and slashes at her from below, nearly cutting at her waist. Rey spins and shifts the saber underhand, blocking and twirling to strike again, again. They clash together, break apart. Rey lunges forward and her double leaps her swing, soaring over her to slash at her back; Rey ducks and springs up to drive herself backwards. Her twin stumbles over broken stone, falls and rolls away, landing in a crouch and re-igniting her saber with bared, pointed teeth. She screams and launches herself at Rey, but Rey’s had a second to find her footing: she twists as she parries, throwing her double aside into a staggering fall that lands her on the ground again. She’s panting, frenzied. She gets up and strikes out at Rey, lashing in bursts of strength, but the hits come a little more slowly. A little more raggedly. Rey defends and blocks, steps back, lets her opponent’s momentum take her to the ground again, over and over. Something is happening that Rey doesn’t quite understand.

“You’re afraid,” Rey says, suddenly. It earns her another snarl, another whirlwind of strikes that Rey blocks easily; Rey drives her back and then steps away, considering her. “You’re afraid,” she says. “And you’re losing.”

“I’m you,” her double spits. “I’m you, I’m your— “

“My other half?” Rey says, incredulously. “He’s taller than you.”

Her twin roars in fury and batters her saber against Rey’s in a shower of light and heat, but somehow Rey can’t feel it—can’t feel the burn of it. She bends her knees and throws her double off, flips the saber backhand and pushes her away. Her twin is limping now, shuffling back as she approaches. “You’re not me,” Rey says. She frowns, thinking. “You were something I feared once.” She paces a slow circle around her. “But not _me._ ”

“You fear what you can become. You fear your true self!”

“I did,” Rey says. Her double swings and Rey meets her swing, beats it back, steps forward to push her over a broken column; her twin lands heavily and her saber falls out of her hand, rolling across the floor. Rey stands over her. Lowers her blade. And feels—pity, mostly. Just pity. The rage and fright are gone. That’s all that’s left. “I wasn’t just afraid, I was ashamed,” Rey says. “But I’m not anymore. I’m not ashamed of the things I feel.” Her double stands. Stretches out her hand and calls the red saber to her. Ignites it again. Rey watches her, calmly. “Love,” she says. “Anger. Grief. They don’t scare me as much as they used to. They’re just… part of being alive,” Rey says. “Not that you would know much about that.”

“Is this the Jedi way?” her double sneers. 

“It’s my way,” Rey shrugs. She turns her saber in her hand. Switches it off. “I’m done with you,” she says. “I don’t have to fight you anymore.” 

Her twin screams and spins her own saber, charges forward, and—Rey closes her eyes. Feels something pass through her, around her, like wind. Like mist. When she opens them again, there’s no one there.

Rey runs through the narrow stone gate that leads to the great cavern, feeling the atmosphere press more and more heavily as she goes; by the time she gets to the mouth of the passageway she’s staggering, barely upright. It feels like she’s being crushed with stones, buried alive. Like the whole planet is tied to her back. She takes deep breaths through her belly, straightens her shoulders. Pushes through, though she feels faint and weak by the time she makes it into the center of the chamber. When she gets there she leans down and puts her hands on her knees, afraid she’s going to be sick again. There are—bodies. Nine of them, arranged in a circle. The cultists she passed by on her desperate journey here, more than a year ago. They are wearing hooded robes of some thick dark cloth, and their features are gnarled, distorted, desiccated; Rey can’t look at them for long. There’s something at the center of their circle, something that is sucking all the air and sound out of the cavern, out of this world. There’s no mistaking it: this is the source of this oppressive feeling that has Rey almost crawling on the ground. She lurches forward towards it, stepping over the bodies. It looks like they were all on their knees when they died: some of them pitched forward as they fell, others slumped to the side. They each still have daggers in their hearts.

A sacrifice, Rey thinks. A sacrifice, for—this. To create this, somehow. She kneels beside it, the tiny pulsating dark pyramid, so like the beacon that Ben once crushed in his hands, what seems like a lifetime ago. The shape is the same, but the color and the patterns on the surface are different, interlocking symbols she can’t read and frankly doesn’t care to. There’s a jet-black crystal mounted to the top of it, depthless and shining and reflective as an oil slick. It ought to be beautiful, that crystal, but when Rey’s hand hovers over it, she can feel a sickness trapped inside it, a hideous crawling feeling that runs up the length of her arm and shivers her spine. It’s tainted, this crystal. This device. It’s _his_ , she knows. 

But there’s something else, too. Another feeling below it, beneath it. Something she can almost touch. 

Rey glances around, stands up. Considers the placement of the circle. Thinks. She kneels down again. Readies herself. Touches the top of the crystal with her fingertips, and reaches out with her mind. There is a way to open it, a way she knows without knowing. She feels the moment when it unlocks. There is a wash of power and light that rocks her back onto her heels; Rey shields her eyes with one hand as the pyramid splits open and a shaft of light bursts from its center. After a second, it resolves into an eerie hologram of a cloaked figure, stooped and grinning.

“The young Jedi,” it says, in a voice like oil, like smoke. “So you are ready at last, to hear my teachings?” The Emperor cackles. “You wish to gain the wisdom I possess? A wisdom which your own masters would forbid you?”

“No,” says Rey. “I want to know what you’ve done with Ben.”

The Emperor’s hologram laughs, low and wicked.

“The boy was… useful to me,” he says. “He is gone now, and with him half your powers. But I can teach you new ways—”

“You’re lying,” she says. 

“Dear child,” the Emperor says, hideously saccharine. “Your foolish affection—”

“I know what a holocron is,” Rey interrupts. “I’ve read about them. I know they’re not easy to make. I know that if the Sith isn’t strong enough, if they make a mistake, they’ll crumble away.”

“My acolytes ensured I would be preserved for all—”

“You know what else I read?” Rey says. “I read that it’s dangerous for a Jedi to touch one. That they can burn us, sicken us. Drive us mad. Do I look mad to you?” 

“Well,” he chuckles. “Does that not prove that you are mine? That this is meant to be? You the apprentice, and I the master?”

“Just the opposite,” Rey says. “It proves that he and I, together, we’re stronger than you.” 

"If power is what you truly seek, child, I can grant you that and more."

"Why don't you offer me what I really want?" Rey says, suddenly. The Emperor peers at her, warily, from under his hood. "If you were really as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be promising me ultimate power, would you? You'd tell me you could bring him back. You know that's why I came here."

"That weak boy—"

"He's the reason you're still here, isn't he?" Rey says. "Somehow you've trapped him in there with you. You're using him like a cell battery to power this... thing. Because _you're_ too weak, on your own." Rey stands up, against the pull of the holocron, against the vacuum of the circle. “I want you to know something, before I do this.”

“I can teach you how to conquer death,” the hologram cries. The image of the Emperor wavers, arms outstretched. “To command it—”

“I want you to know that I’ll remember my parents forever,” Rey says. “And all the good people who stood against you. They’ll live on in me, always. There’ll be songs about them. I’ll make sure of it. But you?” She raises her boot. “After today, I might never think of you again.” The image screams. And Rey brings her foot down as hard as she can.

The holocron shatters into a hundred fragments, like exploding glass. A shockwave goes out from the center of the circle like an earthquake, a thunderclap; it blows her backwards in a tumbling heap. Rey rises on her elbows to watch as the pieces of the shattered crystal spin in the air faster and faster, a riot of angry red light and scattered refractions, and then another burst, and Rey’s lungs fill with the sudden loss of pressure in the air, the breaking and shifting of an enormous weight. The sucking vacuum of the ritual circle’s been broken. The heaviness lifts. Rey struggles to her feet. There are shards of crystal and pieces of circuitry sprayed out all around her, floating still in midair. She turns in a slow circle, reaching out into the force, with all her senses. But the holocron is dead. Pulverized. The yawning mouth of darkness she felt earlier, pressing down on her soul like rocks—gone. Dissipated into the universe. For a long moment, Rey is all that’s left.

And then—

—a movement in the force, in the fragments, like a drop of rain. Rey puts a hand against her heart and inhales sharply. She didn’t know. She really didn’t: a part of her had actually forgotten. Or made herself forget. This—feeling. Like a hidden window, sliding open. Like air coming back in.

There is something thinning in the space around her, in the center of the crushed holocron, the absence it left behind. A kind of blurriness rising from the ground. It distorts the surface of the stone a little, like a sinkhole: unstable and shifting. Rey stretches her hand out towards the blur and it just—vanishes, for a second. Until she pulls it back, cradles it against her chest in surprise. There was something on the other side. Just for a second, but she felt it. Felt is as clearly as she feels her own heart beating, feels the hard stone and packed earth under her knees. This blurring, this thinning in the world: this is what she’s been looking for. Whatever it is, wherever it leads, her open window is on the other side. 

Rey fumbles in her pocket for a minute. Finds her beacon. Presses her thumb into it, activates the biometric alert. Tucks it, blinking, back into her waistband. It’s not a rope, but it’ll have to do, she thinks. 

And dives.

Rey wakes up to cool hands against her face, a dark mass floating above her, haloed in fuzzy light. Her head is aching. Her joints scream when she tries to sit up. She feels like she’s been used as landing gear for a megafreighter. 

“Rey,” the blurry dark mass says. The cool hands cup her cheek. “Rey, look at me.” She tries to. Her eyes cross and uncross. The shape starts to make sense. “What the kark were you thinking,” the shape hisses at her. But the hands are gentle: they’re trembling against her, squeezing her arms, petting her hair. It’s wonderful.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Rey says. She smiles. “I missed you.” 

The dark shape doesn’t speak at that, just wraps its arms around her, lifts her off the ground to cradle her in his lap, the way he’s done before. She sighs and slips her arm around his back. It’s like hugging light.

“You’re deranged,” he murmurs. He presses his cheek to the side of her head. “Impossible.”

“And you’re Ben,” she says. 

“Did you hit your head somewhere?” Ben asks, dryly, because it is Ben: her vision is clearing a little and now she can see his face for real, see his beautiful dark eyes watching hers. R’iia, what eyes. Like bonfires, they are: she can feel a thousand points of fire wherever they land on her. “That’s an—interesting description,” Ben says, now in a slightly choked voice, and oh, she was still talking, it seems. 

“Oh,” Rey says. “Excuse me. I—I think I just need to pass out for a minute,” she says, and then does it. 

.


	5. Chapter 5

In her dream she is lying on her back, facing up at a sky thick with clouds. There’s no sun. She blinks her eyes against the suffused light, stretches her limbs. There’s a fading ache in them, a leftover weariness, like she’s been running for miles and miles and miles. The ground under her is hard, but not entirely uncomfortable: she’s lying on some kind of cloak. It’s been spread out under her back, wedged a little under her neck. It’s quiet where she is. No birds sing, no wind whistles. But she’s not alone, which makes it a better dream than most. There’s a body lying next to hers, her senses tell her. Close by, but not touching: for some reason it makes her smile. Rey rolls onto her side, tucks her hands under her chin. 

He is already awake in this dream, watching her. He doesn’t speak. Just studies her, with those wildfire eyes. She drinks him in: his broad shoulders, curled in on themselves. His thick dark hair, tossed and unruly. His head is pillowed on one arm and his hand is tucked under it, his body almost a mirror of hers. They are two lines curving towards each other, she thinks. Almost a circle. Rey reaches for him and he inhales, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. He goes perfectly still and Rey rolls herself into the crescent moon of his body, buries her face between his curved arms, wraps her arm around his middle. He’s not exactly warm, but for the moment it doesn’t really register to her. She’s never had a dream like this before, where he was so real. So close. So solid to the touch. Oh, she’s thought about it, daydreamed it: what it would feel like to hold him, to be held by him, the way she was for that one minute—that briefest minute, when he dragged her back to life. Rey burrows her face into the hollow under his chin. 

“Rey,” he says, finally. His voice is scraped raw. He shifts a little, frees one arm. Puts it tentatively against her shoulder, as if to gently push her back. Rey scowls and holds him tighter, then wraps her leg over his for good measure, hooking it behind his knee. Ben goes completely rigid again, like a spooked sandborer.

“Don’t go,” she says. Her face is muffled against his chest. “Please don’t.” 

His hand slides off her shoulder, then draws up around her back. His broad hand cradles the back of her head, fingers tangling a little in her loosened bun. He strokes small circles against the side of her neck with his thumb. Rey sighs and squeezes his waist.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says, quietly. Rey snorts. The fingers in her hair are saying differently. Trust him to give her mixed messages even in her subconscious.

“It’s my dream,” Rey says. “I’ll be wherever I want.” He stops stroking her neck and rolls back a little bit, suddenly. His eyes look—sad, maybe. A little surprised. Rey looks at him curiously. “What? What’s wrong?”

“You’re not dreaming.”

“What?” Rey says. Her mouth makes a soft o. “I’m—what?” 

Ben takes her hand in his, puts it against his chest, over his heart. Where his heart ought to be. Rey freezes. It’s not beating, she thinks. It’s not beating, and he’s not warm the way she is. He’s cool and silent inside, even though she can feel his presence in her mind again, the reassuring weight of his being, the lines that join them like cabling. But he’s not—Rey’s own pulse pounds in her ears, over the thought. She untangles herself and sits upright frantically. Ben sits up, more slowly, beside her. Now she can see it: the strangeness of her dreamscape. They’re on a low hilltop that looks out over an endless plain, studded with ruins, fallen shelters, collapsed temples and walkways, winding away to nothing. There’s nothing but stone and flat greyish grass as far as she can see: even the sky is grey, cold and clouded. There’s no breeze, though there is air: Rey fills her lungs too quickly and feels lightheaded for a second. “Where are we,” she says, with dawning horror. Her hands have become fists without meaning to. Ben gives her a thin smile.

“The world between worlds, I think,” he says. “The lore is—unspecific in a lot of places.”

“But,” Rey says. “Then you’re still—but I—”

“Like I told you,” Ben says, grimly. “You really shouldn’t be here, Rey.”

Rey stretches her hand out to the stone, sets her palms against it and tries to find anything, a seam of feeling, a sign of life. There’s something at the surface, something almost conscious, the way that plants are nearly so, but it’s nothing she can quite reach. And the core of the wall is as silent as the rest of this placidly barren world. Rey frowns and looks over her shoulder at Ben, who is hovering nearby with his arms crossed anxiously, one hand against his mouth.

“You’re sure this is the exact spot?”

“You fell out of a wall,” he says, curtly, through his fingers. “I remember it pretty clearly.”

Rey steps back, considers it. 

They’re standing in a ruin, what must have once been a great courtyard ringed with stone walls. Now the paving is cracked and the walls are collapsed in places. Where they’re not, there are pictures: mosaics, rippling scenes made of pebbles. Rey’s seen things like this before, glittering mosaics in the lobbies of government buildings on Coruscant, but those were done in all the colors of the rainbow and every kind of stone and gem. These are more restrained, less exuberant and dazzling. But no less beautiful. The pebbles are all in shades of white and grey and brown and black; the lines are simple but the overall effect is stunning, a shaded symphony of form that’s almost three-dimensional. She doesn’t know much about art, but the pictures are powerful. They call to her, to the force inside her: they stretch and weave in and out of one another, figures clashing over caverns of darkness, locked in combat or folded into tender embraces, arranged in ritual circles and making gestures of incantation; the overall effect is like looking back over the history of eternity, a panoply of stories that are at once strange and familiar, a vast mirror of souls. 

“What are these, exactly?” Rey turns a slow circle, trying to take them all in. Strangely enough, the wall she apparently fell through doesn’t have any figures at all. Instead it has a scene of what must be a meadow: there are wildflowers covering a curving hillside, a rising sun at the edge of an empty field. It reminds her a little of Yavin. “They feel… alive,” Rey says. “Like if I looked away for a second, they’d change. Become other pictures. Other stories.” She crosses to the opposite wall and runs her hands along a line of white stones, a curving pathway between the stars, on which a woman in white is running. _This_ one reminds her of Leia. “Do you know who made them?” Rey asks. She thinks about the mosaic in Luke’s little pool, the pebbled symbol under shallow water. “Could it have been the Jedi?”

“No,” Ben says. “They were here long before any Jedi came. They’ll be here long after they’re all gone.”

“That’s mysterious.”

“Do you remember what you did?” he says, switching back, the way he has every time she goes on another tangent. “What _exactly_ you did, to come through.”

“I smashed the holocron, and then there was just this—thinness in the world. And I felt something on the other side, so I just… came through. That’s all.” Rey shrugs. 

“There was nothing else?”

“Why are you being like this?” Rey says. “Am I interrupting you? Do you have to get back to all your—big nothingness?” she asks, and gestures at the grey fields beyond them. 

“The longer you stay here, the more dangerous it is,” he says, tightly. “What if you can’t get back across?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Rey says. “You and I.” 

“There has to be something,” he says. “Something you did, something you saw—”

“Are you even happy to see me?” Rey says, raising her voice, and Ben stops. Stops and stares at her. “Do you even care that I came here, that I came here for _you_?”

“Rey,” he breathes. 

“Rey what,” she snaps.

“You were _dead_ ,” he says. “You were _dead_ when I got to you, do you know what—I can't do that again, do you know what that feels like?” he says, and now Rey’s the one staring at him.

“Yes,” she says. Ben’s face crumples. “Of course I do,” Rey says, and she can feel hot furious tears welling in her eyes. “Only you didn’t wake up, and you didn’t come back,” she says, and Ben pulls her into his arms and she grabs at him, fists his shirt in her hands. His face tucks against her hair, his hands cradle the back of her head. He engulfs her. Rey hides her face in his chest again; he’s the perfect height for it, she thinks, dizzily.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He’s radiating it at her. Grief and apology, and—joy. A deep feeling that he’s smothering, trying to swallow, trying to bury. He can’t believe that she’s here, that she’s so close, that she’d—and he can’t let himself feel too much, can’t let himself go. Rey almost feels like laughing. We’re the same, she thinks. We really are the same.

“I know,” she says, muffled.

“There are things here,” he says. “Shadows. I don’t know how long it will take them to find you, but… this isn’t a place for the living,” Ben says. “You know it’s true.”

She does know that, actually: she can feel it now in everything, the cold reserve of this world poised against her. It’s not hostility, not exactly. But there is a wrongness to things: a sensation like she’s been forced into clothes that don’t fit, and are shrinking further every minute. The force is everywhere in this place, almost oppressively so, but it’s nothing like Yavin or Naboo, where there is a kind of energy to things, a churning circularity of life and death and change, bubbling in her consciousness like an overflowing spring. This is something else. It’s almost like… the stillness of the force is all she can feel. The enduring continuity of it, which is an aspect she’s tapped into, but never so—exclusively. So totally. Nothing is living here, but her. Nothing is dying here, either. Just enduring. Rey lets him go after a long minute, and he releases her but he doesn’t move away. He stays stooped, meeting her eyes. Rey wipes at her face a little. 

“I remembered something,” she says. “Something else I did.” Rey pats at her waistband, but the beacon’s not there anymore. “Huh,” she says. 

“What is it?”

“I had a beacon,” she says. “I pressed it just before I came through.” They find it in the grass, near where she was lying when she first woke up. The beacon is still flashing brightly, the brightest thing in this grey world. She doesn’t understand how, but honestly, the list of things she doesn’t understand gets longer every day of her life. Rey holds it up, turns it over. “There was nothing special about it,” she says. “It’s just a regular beacon. I left another one with my BB unit, and one with Finn.” Ben looks thoughtful.

“If it’s still activated—”

“—maybe it’s still connecting us,” Rey finishes. She closes her eyes, focuses on the point of light in her hand. The circuitry and the signal, pulsing. She opens herself to the force and narrows into the sensation of the beacon’s even blink, traces it outward, past herself, out across the strange silent world, back to the wall, the picture of wildflowers, and beyond it—“I can feel it,” Rey gasps, and pitches forward just a little. Ben steadies her with one hand. “I can feel it on the other side, I can feel the one I left behind.” 

At the wall with the wildflower mosaic, Rey tries again: holds the beacon tightly in one hand and reaches out with the other. This time the wall—relaxes, somehow, as she makes contact. Rey pushes, gritting her teeth, focusing on the thin thread she can still sense between her beacon and the BB unit’s, the signal still humming improbably between them. And something gives: Rey lurches forward and her arm goes through the wall up to the shoulder, easily. “Ha!” Rey cries, exultant. “Hang onto me,” she says, grabbing for him.

“Rey, no,” he says, startled, but she grabs him anyway, and tugs him towards the thinning wall, to pull them both across, but Ben just—stops. His hands are flat against the wall, even though Rey’s halfway through it. Rey backs up and tries to push at him, then pulls him closer, but there’s no give. The wall is solid for him. “Rey, it’s not going to—”

“No,” she says. Rey clenches the beacon in one hand and locks her arm around his, then tries to force their linked arms through, together. The edge of her hand sinks into the wall easily, disappearing at the edges. But his hand sticks firmly against the stone. When she pulls it away it has the imprint of the pebbles for a second. “Are you doing this?” she asks. “Just—relax your arms or something, here, try again—”

“It’s not my arms," Ben says.

"Then what th—"

“It’s that I’m dead."

“Don’t _say_ that,” Rey snaps. “I’m not doing this. Try again. I am not going through without you.”

“You have to.”

“No, I don’t,” Rey seethes. She kicks at the wall, but her foot goes through it. Rey gives a little snarl of rage. “Karking _druk_!” 

“Rey, you have to go.”

“No I _don’t_!” Rey shouts. “I won’t leave you here. I won’t.”

“You destroyed the holocron,” Ben says. “You’ve done enough for me.”

“What are you going to do?” Rey says, bewildered. “Just.. stay here forever? Alone? You’ll go mad here.”

“No, I won’t,” Ben says. “I’ll—” He looks at her, and looks away. “I’m not trapped anymore. I’ll do what I’m meant to do.”

“What?”

“To… pass into the next realm,” Ben says. “Eventually.”

“The next realm,” Rey says, flatly. “And that’s what you want.”

“It’s what I’m supposed to do.”

“Oh, kark," says Rey. "You’re terrible at doing what you’re supposed to do." Ben swivels, frowning, like he can’t decide whether she’s just insulted him or not. “And so am I,” Rey adds. “You were a lousy Sith, we both know it. And I’m…”

“You’re a Jedi,” Ben says. There’s pride in his voice. “Don’t pretend to be less than you are.”

“I know what I am,” Rey says. “But—you were right,” she says, and pauses. Scrunches up her face a little. “And you were wrong. Really wrong.” Ben’s eyebrows lift. “You can’t kill the past. But that doesn’t mean we have to do the same things, over and over again. Make the same mistakes. If I’m going to be a Jedi I’m going to do it my own way,” Rey says. She swallows, hard. “Come with me,” she says. “Come back with me. If the beacon won’t take us both then we’ll find another way. I know we can. We’re not finished,” she says, and lays a hand over his heart. It’s still silent, but his eyes—his heart may not be beating but his eyes are alive, as alive as her, alive in a way they shouldn’t be, alive and hungry and pained. This isn’t peace, she thinks. Whatever he’s feeling, it isn’t peace, it isn’t—completeness in the force. When she looks at Leia she doesn’t see this in her gaze. This is something else. If only he would kriffing _tell her_ , Rey thinks, pointedly, at him.

“I can’t.”

“You’re free now,” Rey urges. “You said it yourself.”

“Free of the holocron,” he says. “Free of him.”

“So now you can just be a… a memory? Or maybe you can show up sometimes like a ghost, and correct my blocking forms,” Rey says, bitterly, and Ben actually flinches, struck. “You wanted me to take your hand, and now I offer you mine,” Rey says, “and that’s not—good enough for you, somehow—”

“ _I’m_ not good enough,” Ben hisses. “You know, you know I’m not—after everything I’ve—was getting used for a _Sith holocron_ not enough of a _sign_ for you,” he says, wretchedly, and turns away from her. "Whatever I—this is what I am. And this is where I belong." His solid presence flickers, barely; for a moment, she can almost see right through him. It’s horrible. It breaks her heart. “I’m sorry I never came before,” he says, more quietly, without turning around. “But the truth is, I shouldn’t. And if I stay here, on this plane, I’m not—I won’t be strong enough to stay away from you.”

“That is,” Rey says. “Ben. That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” She puts a hand against her temple. “I don’t— _want_ you to stay away from me, you—you skrogging, krong-headed _laserbrain_!” Ben looks like she’s dropped an anvil on him. It’s fairly satisfying, at least for a second. “I want _you_!” Rey shouts. “And I _know_ what you are,” she says, and wills her voice not to shake. “I know everything that you are. I might be the only person who does."

"You are," Ben says, raggedly. 

Rey inhales.

"I still want you," she says. "I’ve wanted you since,” she goes on, and then her face colors, because she knows he can sense exactly the moment she’s thinking of, and there is something humiliating in the innocence of it, of losing all her senses over the single touch of a fingertip in a dirty little hut somewhere, like a fool in a fairytale. But when she looks up at Ben’s face it isn’t smirking or knowing or pitying, it’s bare and helpless, demolished. Defenseless against that memory. He feels exactly the same. And suddenly she feels everything, his desires breaking open against her, around hers: his fear and his doubt, his shame, the band around his heart that is cracking him in half. He hates himself, she thinks. And that hatred used to fuel him. It’s a strong feeling but there’s a much stronger one that’s uprooting everything else, ripping up his shame and rage and helplessness like they were dead trees caught in a gale wind. There’s nothing in him that can stand against it anymore: nothing that even wants to. He is tearing his own foundations apart for her. “Ben,” she says. She reaches out her hand to him. “Let go.” 

He grabs for her and their hands connect, like two strikes of lightning, dazing them both; they drag each other in and then they’re kissing, clutching at each other. Rey throws her arms around his neck and Ben lifts her off the ground and presses her beating heart against him, into him: her own heartbeat hammers wildly through them both, like he’s almost alive in her arms. Rey buries her hands in his hair and turns her head to kiss him more deeply, opening their mouths together, their minds: a feedback loop of pleasure and relief and also of agony, a kind of unspeakable terrified grief that is shattering inside them both, scattering out around them like the broken holocron, into pieces. “Tell me what you want,” Rey says, fiercely. She closes her eyes and wraps her arms around his neck again. “Tell me what you really want.”

“I want you,” he says. “I want to be with you.” He’s holding her so tight that his voice reverberates against her, like a drum. “I want to be with you wherever you are, go with you wherever you go. I want,” he says, and buries his face in her shoulder. “I want a—life with you, I want to live—I want to try again," he says, and his voice cracks.

"Alright," Rey says. She kisses the side of his head. "Then let's go." Ben vibrates a little, holding in a low, slightly hysterical laugh.

"Sure," he says. "Let's go."

 _You don't think we can do it?_ she asks, inside his head. And she sees his true feelings: he doesn't doubt her. He just doubts the universe could be so kind. _So you trust me?_

_Yes_ , he says. 

“Okay,” Rey murmurs, against his mouth. “Remember you said that.”

Rey braces herself against his knee and unbalances them both, tipping them against the wall of wildflowers, falling backwards into space. She is still clutching him, tightly: at the second he should hit the wall and hang behind her, she crushes the beacon in her fist. A slow shockwave explodes inside the portal, tremoring around and through them like ripples in a pond, and they fall through together, careening untethered into darkness.

They wake up together on the floor of the cavern on Exogal, cold and shivering. His arms are still around her. When Rey sits up her fingers catch in a clump of grass. Ben sits up too, and they stare down at their legs, at the circle of green around them. The petals of white and pink and yellow that are scattered and crushed beneath them: spinebarrels and starweeds, ferngrass and little blue dust-blossoms. They are sitting at the bottom of a dead world in a patch of flowers.

 _Were we just_ , Ben thinks, trailingly, at her. They look at each other. Rey remembers darkness, soft solid darkness. No sound, no substance. No up or down. Only the feeling of his body against hers. _I remember… light_ , he says, and cups his hand against his chest. And now she remembers it too: their hands joined together, cradled between their chests. A light from inside, from the light they carried in them, always. Just the faintest little flicker like a candle, a rushlight. Barely enough to see each others' faces by. But they had looked and wondered, all the same. And now Rey remembers other things: the way she breathed into his mouth, into his lungs. The way his heart began to—

“Your _heart,_ ” Rey says, and lurches forward, up onto her knees, to press her palm against his chest. It’s beating. Thundering. Rey stares down at him with her mouth open, and Ben stares up. 

Around them, the wildflowers bloom.

.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Please note: fic rating has changed.**

From her high perch on top of the freshly-disabled signal antenna, one hill over, Rey has a good vantage point over the entrance to the base, which is fronted by a high earth wall and a large square courtyard for loading in. There’s been increasingly frantic movement over the last twenty minutes or so, ever since she sliced into the base’s communication circuits, cut them off from the rest of the Order bandwidth, and then blasted Finn and Jannah’s recording through every speaker and radio unit in the entire complex. They’ve used it before, many times, to pretty mixed effect, but their last two tries have been more successful than they imagined. An entire platoon at Rigat lined up and laid down their helmets and weapons three weeks ago: forty troopers who were finished fighting. Who wanted to start over. They’d handed over their officers eagerly, tied up with tape webbing, their pockets full of intel drives. Several of the troopers had begged to meet Finn; in the end he’d had to go around shaking hands and talking to everybody for hours and hours after the base was cleared and the shuttles had been sent down. 

Rey’s radio crackles.

“It’s like you know I’m thinking about you,” Rey says; she can hear Finn laugh on the other end. 

“Anything yet?”

“Oh, it’s definitely having an impact,” Rey mutters. Mostly officers testing perimeter droids and waving speeder-haulers through the gate, running between the loading bay doors and the watch tower. They’d sent two people up to check on this very antenna as soon as their comms went dead, but surprise surprise, as soon as they’d come across Rey in her hiding spot they’d realized they were both extremely sleepy and decided to lie down in the sun for a nap. Rey glances over at them: she’s bound their hands and ankles, but they’re not going to wake up anytime soon, regardless. “You guys catching anything on the bandwidth?”

“Nope,” Poe says. “You cut the line clean. Nothing’s come through, no distress signals.” He’s with a crew of speeders on the opposite end of the ridge, out of sight. “Not a peep.”

“Jedi,” Finn says. “Slicer. Is there anything she can’t do?" Rey stifles a laugh.

 _Is anyone going to give the signal?_ Ben says, low and rumbling, inside her head. _Or did we all just come here for fun?_

 _Switch off,_ she grins, to him, and to everyone else she says, “Ready?”

“Ready!”

Rey presses the button. There’s an explosion at the southwest corner of the base that sends up showers of rock and dust into the air, and the perimeter droids rush out towards it, buzzing and firing into the debris; Rey jumps down and starts her descent across the craggy hillside. As far as distractions go, it’s not exactly subtle. In the excitement Finn and Jannah’s crew will slip in from the back, to go up quiet through the complex and hit the command center from within, while Poe’s crew whips over the ridge and storms the front; between the two of them it should be a pincer movement that leaves the base stunned and ready to surrender. Rey’s piece is to slip into the fight and deliver mayhem where needed. It worked at Hastoi and it’s mostly working now, though she keeps her radio to her ear as she goes. Finn signals when he’s got the command center, but he sounds strained. 

“There’s something weird here,” he says. “It was a little too easy.”

“We could use some easy!” Poe calls; there’s the sound of blaster fire behind him. Rey runs to the edge of the ridge and sees the speeder charge veering off to evade another cluster of perimeter droids. 

“You know how bases usually have, uh, a lot of people in them?” Finn says. 

“What?”

“I’m just saying, it’s a little too emp—Jannah, _down_!” Finn yells, and there’s the crackling sound of a lightsaber igniting, and then static.

 _Finn!_ Rey shrieks, yanking at their connection. He doesn’t respond, but Rey can feel him moving frantically through the base, flickering in and out as he gains and loses control of whatever fight he’s in. Rey runs faster, leaps from a low outcropping onto the upper wall of the base courtyard and runs along the top, dodging fire from perimeter droids and a handful of snipers positioned around the watchtowers. _Ben_ , she thinks, desperately, _Ben, I’m not close enough—_

 _I’m already on it,_ he says, and Rey breathes, and jumps.

She flips and lands in a crouch in the lower courtyard, behind a row of speeders. She deflects sniper fire and sends it back, but there’s a break in the shooting anyway: the towers are taking fire from Poe’s speeders now. A few of them soar overhead, shooting down droids in a rain of sparks and metal. For a minute or two Rey’s caught in a crossfire between droids, which she ends by grabbing one with the force and spinning around to smash it against the other one like two takk balls. Except that takk balls don’t explode. There’s a grinding noise and Rey turns to see the main bay doors opening a fraction. Rey braces herself but it’s Finn and Jannah and a handful of other ex-troopers who come racing out of the narrow slit in the doors; when Finn spots her he waves his arms frantically. 

“IT’S A _TRAP_!” Finn screams. “REY, _MOVE_!”

But it’s just a second too late: the bay doors explode outward and Rey is flung bodily into the speeders, blinded, ears ringing. She rolls and chokes on dust, struggling on hands and knees to get under cover. From her belly she looks through the chaos in the courtyard: she sees Finn struggling up, dragging one of his crew behind him by their harness. Rey grits her teeth and gets up, races to him and grabs the woman’s arm; they manage to drag her behind a broken piece of durasteel that’s been fractured off and stuck into the ground. 

_What kind of trap?_ Rey yells between their minds, because she can’t hear a karking thing. But she feels the shock in the ground, and they turn together to see a massive walking gunner-bot burst through the wrecked base doors, firing a spray of blaster bolts that nearly clip them both. Rey yanks Finn out of the way and they crouch down, watching Poe’s surprised speeder crew make a loop and come back in formation, trying to take the walker down. _We have to help them,_ Rey says, but Finn holds her back a second.

 _That’s not all,_ he says. 

_There’s more of them?_

_Oh, there’s more of them_ , Ben’s voice cuts into her consciousness, dryly, somewhere inside still but drawing closer. Rey still can’t see him anywhere. But on cue, a wave of battle droids march out behind the walker, leveling fire across everything. Rey and Finn duck their heads up and see Jannah and a few others in position behind an overturned speeder wagon, taking down droids, but it’s like a swarm now, and more keep coming. There’s a crashing noise and a speeder lands heavily in the courtyard close to them, nose crumpling on the ground. The pilot and a couple of riders jump out, firing for cover as they run to Rey and Finn. 

“You guys okay?” the pilot shouts. It’s one of Poe’s friends, somebody Rey immediately feels guilty about not quite recognizing. “We’ve got the perimeter droids down, figured you could use a hand!”

“Thanks!” Finn yells. He turns to Rey. “You ready?”

“Ready enough,” she says, and they leap together over the top of the crates, spinning into motion: they weave between the droids, deflecting fire and slashing as they go, the pair of them moving outward and then cutting back towards each other in a zig-zag formation. _Just like we’ve practiced,_ she says, trying to breathe steadily and hang onto the feeling of him, her awareness of him in space, trying to help him stay anchored. Finn’s blade arcs and sends a blaster shot into a droid that was aiming up behind her; she flips and lands behind another droid, slashing it cleanly in half and deflecting fire with her free hand. It’s working, it’s working, except for the giant— _look out_ , she shrieks, but it’s too late: Finn’s caught in the arm by a shot from the walker, and he goes down rolling, snaking himself under cover. Rey ducks down too, and they lock eyes across the courtyard, panting. 

_I’m okay,_ he sends. _Just clipped me._

 _We have to get this karking walker down,_ Rey seethes. 

_Just give me a second_.

 _No, you stay put,_ Rey thinks. She reignites her saber. _I’ve got this_.

_Rey, no—_

“Lord Ren!” somebody cries, from across the courtyard, and both of their heads swivel around at the same time. 

It’s an officer in a black uniform, flanked by a dozen elite troopers in grey, all of them positioned behind a tactical durasteel barrier. The officer waves over the top of the barrier, triumphantly, while the rest of the troopers lay fire down onto the crates and overturned speeders sheltering Jannah’s crew. What’s left of the tower snipers, Rey thinks. The officer whoops. “Lord Ren has returned!” he hollers. Rey and Finn follow his line of sight to the bay doors, where Ben’s just come into view in his plain black robes, looking a little sweaty and irritated, exactly like he’s been cutting his way through droids in a long series of close hallways. His eyes are narrowed and his big shoulders are deceptively loose, the way he gets ready to coil for a strike. Huh, Rey thinks. He’s wearing an expression that really used to get her blood up in a fight. It’s giving her another feeling entirely right now. “You Alliance scum,” the officer hollers back over the barrier, “now you’ll see the true might—”

Ben reaches out one hand and makes a fist and the officer chokes midsentence and rises straight up over the barrier, kicking wildly. Ben opens his hand and the man goes soaring outward, hitting the far wall with a hard thump and sliding to the ground. The rest of the troopers stop firing for a second, frozen. 

“Traitor!” one of them shouts.

 _Wow,_ Finn sends her, cheerfully. _Now he knows what that feels like._

Ben ignites his saber. Blue’s really his color, Rey thinks.

Between the three of them they have very little trouble finishing off the walker: Finn slashes the struts to halt it and Ben gets on top to jam his lightsaber straight down into the walker’s command circuit, wrenching the blade through to the other side. The walker wobbles and splits; they all jump away from it as it takes a single tottering step and then cleaves full in half, collapsing on the ground in a twitching, broken heap. Jannah’s group sends up a shout and then it’s a fair fight again. The snipers surrender and the scattered, leftover droids are quickly mopped up. Once Poe’s team clears the courtyard and takes another sweep through the base, it’s over. Even Finn’s arm is an easy fix, thankfully, once Poe stops fussing over dressing the wound for five minutes and lets Rey actually heal it. 

“Droids,” Finn says with disgust, kicking some broken blaster attachments aside. He looks up, like a hopeful thought’s just struck him. “Maybe they’re really running out of conscripts, huh? More deserters than they can handle?”

“I think you’re right,” Rey says. “This felt desperate. Like a last gasp.”

“From your mouth to the force’s ears,” Finn says. He sighs. He catches Rey’s eyes and nods across to where Ben is standing over the captured snipers; he’s not doing anything really, but they’re all plastered against the opposite wall from him, sitting stock-still and behaving while somebody from Jannah’s team reads them their rights and processes them into Alliance custody. Rey sends Ben a picture, just a snatch of a thought, and enjoys watching his face color from a distance, even though his steely expression doesn’t falter. “He saved our butts back there,” Finn says, unexpectedly, and Rey looks back at him. “We got pinned down in a turn, coming out of the command room. He comes up behind the droids, says to run, he’ll keep us covered.” Rey doesn’t say anything. She can tell he’s not quite finished. “I’d heard a lot about him, before I ever got sent out on a mission. Whatever else he—was like, nobody ever said he was a coward.”

Rey hugs him. 

“I’m just glad you’re alright.”

“Still not friends, at all, for the record,” Finn says, and hugs her back.

Finn rides with Poe and Jannah and the rest of them back to temporary command, but Rey and Ben make the trek across the sand to where they stashed her borrowed scout freighter earlier this morning, an out of sight spot in a canyon a few klicks away. It was practical, to bring a second ship: useful to come in a little early and scope out the terrain. But the truth of the matter is, most of the others still won’t ride in close quarters with Ben. She can’t exactly blame them, and she knows it doesn’t offend him. Or surprise him. Someday their feelings might change. Who knows. For the moment, she’s not complaining about the chance to be alone together. They don’t talk much as they go. Rey still feels like her whole face is full of dirt from the last big explosion, and Ben is thinking deeply about something he doesn’t feel like sharing just yet. It’s a companionable silence. Their hands brush together, on and off, as they walk. 

Rey lowers the ramp, trudges up it, and she’s just heading tiredly down the hallway to the cockpit when Ben puts an arm around her waist and scoops her up, one hand under her legs, lifting her right off the floor.

“You had to send _that_ picture,” he says, turning them away from the cockpit and taking them in the entirely opposite direction. 

“What,” Rey says, and then remembers. She pushes at him, laughing. “You just looked so serious right then.”

“I was being serious,” he says. “I was guarding prisoners of—the Alliance, Rey,” he says, stumbling over his words when she loops her arm closer around his neck and bites lightly down on his earlobe. He walks to the end of the hallway, quickly, and then turns in a circle. “And you thought that was the time—”

“Is _this_ what you were brooding about, all the way here?” Rey grins. “Amazing. I see right through you now.” Ben makes a noise of frustration and paces them back in the other direction, checking along the wall for something. “Your big pensive act. What a phony.” Ben comes to a stop in the middle of the hallway, looking like he’s going to explode. 

“Where,” he says, tightly, “the _kark_ are the crew quarters on this loaner piece of _shi_ —”

“That way,” Rey points, sweetly, the way they came. “Just up a little to the left. You were going so fast you missed them.” Ben says something that’s functionally illegal in several systems and finally finds the door, leans back and actually uses his foot to press the opening mechanism, and then he’s dropping her gently onto the narrow little pallet, kissing her while he unties her boots and slides them off, kissing her while he unclasps her belts and pulls her tunic off, swearing under his breath when he has to stop kissing her to sit up and pull his own tunic off and slide out of his pants. Rey wriggles out of her leggings and reaches for him and he comes, naked and still a little sweaty and so hard already against her thigh that it’s almost incredible. “Did you have this the whole walk?” Rey says. “We could have stopped in a cave somewhere.” Ben pulls back a second later to stare down at her. “What?”

“You’re actually serious.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Rey says, and runs her fingers over his hips, pulls them down flush with her hips in greedy handfuls. “I grew up in a giant dirty sandpit, how squeamish could I be?” Ben flushes and rocks against her desperately, leans down to mouth at her throat. 

“I’ll file that away,” he murmurs, and then he slides down, eludes Rey’s grasping hands, and settles between her spread thighs. Rey grins and throws her head back and he lowers his mouth to her sex, hums with pleasure against her and spreads her a little with his fingers, licks a tentative stripe along her and then makes slow circles with his tongue. Rey rubs her fingertips in his hair and he laps at her until her thighs are shivering and her belly’s clenching. 

“Come back up here,” she says, finally, and he crawls up her with his mouth and chin glistening, and Rey reaches down to pull at him a little while he kisses her own taste into her mouth. “Hmm,” she says. 

“Hmm?”

“Flip over.” He does it, and the rickety little pallet very nearly breaks, but then Rey throws her leg over his waist and lowers herself onto him slowly and Ben’s breath comes in short shallow little pants. His hands creep onto her hips and dig into the meat of them, pulling them together until he’s as deep as he can go, which is—pretty deep, Rey thinks, breathlessly. She rocks on him and Ben’s eyes flutter shut. They start slow. Rey takes her time rolling her hips, forcing little soft pants out of him, enjoying the way he strains against her helplessly. But finally he drags her down and knits their fingers together above his head, planting his feet on the edge of the pallet and driving upwards until Rey’s panting too, so close; he rolls them over and the angle changes and it’s good, so good, just right; Rey cants her hips up, traps his waist between her thighs and squeezes, crying out a little on every thrust, and then she’s off, soaring, crashing. Rey throws her head back and lets go: nobody can hear them, after all. The sound of her sets Ben off, the way it usually does; he digs in and kisses her desperately and then shakes against her, his hips jerking reflexively and his whole huge body curling over hers, shaking with uneven breath. He hides his face against her neck for a second, and Rey rubs her hands against the backs of his arms, bonelessly happy, and kisses the tangle of his hair. 

“Good?” he murmurs.

“Was I not loud enough?” Rey says, against his ear, and now he’s shuddering with laughter a little bit, and then inhaling as he pulls out of her. He rolls down against her back, drawing her to his chest and wrapping an arm around her middle. He puts his face back into the nape of her neck. His warm breath heats her. He’s strangely shy like this, afterwards, sometimes: not shy about wanting her, that’s for sure. But shy about having her, Rey thinks. About having any of this. She wraps her arm around the one holding her. “Ben,” she says. He hums against her spine, listening. “Thank you. For going after Finn.” He stills, then presses a kiss against her, feather-light. 

“He was doing fine on his own,” Ben says. “He’s trained hard.”

“Just take the praise, you _skoo lurdo_ ,” she says, and shuts her eyes to cuddle back against him. She can feel him smiling a little, against her skin.

“Is that poetry?” he says. “You don’t need to woo me.”

“ _E chu ta_ ,” says Rey.

Ben is lifting rocks.

“You know what? I love this,” Finn says. He sips from his mug of caf. “I do really love that he sucks. He just… sucks, so much.”

He and Rey are sitting side by side on top of their biggest finished hut, which will probably become a dormitory or a study room someday; for now it’s where they store their food and do their cooking. Breakfast was porridge and little sausages crisped over the fire. Hot caf is a treat: Poe brought them an autocaf machine as a hut-warming gift a few weeks ago and it feels like Finn’s been drinking a cup every few hours nonstop since then. He’s been vibrating in their dual meditations. She keeps warning him he's going to ascend if he doesn't cut back.

They’re looking out over the temple complex, which is still mostly walkways and spaces laid out for foundations. In the distance the former Supreme Leader of the First Order is currently trying to stack boulders into something resembling an even square, and failing miserably. Rey’s giving Ben his privacy for the moment, but she does occasionally get incidental flashes of how sweaty and frustrated he’s feeling. Not angry, though, which is interesting. But almost everything about him is interesting, to her, she finds: being with him like this, for real, has offered something new to puzzle at daily.

“To his credit, we were practicing for a year, and he was dead.”

“Yeah, but,” Finn says, and Ben drops a boulder into place with too much force, and it cracks in half. There is a very faint _kark_ , from across the field. Rey hides her laugh behind her own mug, and Finn shakes his head. “He is so much worse than we were. I could literally sit here and watch this all day.” 

“Mm,” says Rey. The tiny figure of Ben sets the next stone crookedly, then just leans his head back and looks up at the sky for a while. “We might have to.”

It’s strange, the things that have changed in him, at least from her perspective. In battle he’s still a ferocious fighter; when the two of them—or three of them, increasingly—move in sync in combat, there’s nothing he can’t do, no power he can’t summon. But working on his own like this, with tasks that require meditative calm and clarity of focus, Rey’s watched him struggle. He works at it, with a deep well of patience that’s also surprised her, and gets better every day. She just never anticipated seeing him challenged at all where the force was concerned. He was a whirlwind when they used to fight, capable of anything, wielding the force like a crushing hammer, an avalanche. She knows Snoke encouraged that in him: she’s seen traces of the kinds of… so-called _exercises_ he was ordered to complete, in his head. They’re utterly horrifying. It's hard, she knows, to just feel the wood and stone and wind: to be part of the world without trying to beat it into shape.

After a while Finn sighs and goes to check the comm; he's been waiting for a message from Lando for the last few days and Rey knows he’s anxious to be there when it comes in. She finishes her caf and jumps down from the roof, then takes a slow walk up to the crest of the hill, where Ben’s sad little hut is finally starting to resemble something. Ben wipes the hair out of his eyes and watches her come up. His mouth quirks at the corner, and for a second Rey thinks, unbidden, that’s Leia’s. That little piece, just there. She tucks the thought away before he can see it, or just read it on her face. She doesn’t know how ready he is for that.

“If you’re going to tell me it’s crooked—”

“I’m not,” Rey says. She holds her hand out. Ben takes it. Rey closes her eyes and finds him in the force, the ragged luminescence of him. His signature is like solar flares. Not the steady, featureless radiance of a holo-lamp, but a storm of light that’s infinitely brighter. Against her, she can feel him opening himself. Welcoming her. She opens her eyes and smiles at him. “Want to try placing that corner stone again?”

“Not particularly,” Ben says, but he’s smiling. He releases her hand and straightens himself, exhales. Closes his eyes.

The stone shifts, rises, slots itself neatly into place. Sinks again, gently, settling right.

“We need to talk,” Poe says, when he’s back from Coruscant. He’s brought Rey a stack of supply crates taller than she is, and a couple of names, too: people that have reached out to the Alliance to ask about her, about Finn, about the new Jedi. People who have been hearing about the force again, for the first time in a long time, as something other than myth. People who are afraid that there is something inside them—or inside their children—that they don’t understand. It’s made her excited and terrified in equal measure. Her students. They're coming sooner than she thinks. 

“I know,” Rey says. “About Ben.” Poe glances at her, and frowns. “I’m not listening to your thoughts,” Rey says. “I’m reading the giant neon sign on your face.”

He exhales.

“Fair enough,” he says. “Look, there’s been a lot more—chatter, lately. Probably inevitable. We’ve resettled something like nineteen thousand stormtroopers in three different systems over the last six months. It’s going around that Kylo Ren is working for the Alliance. It’s still just a rumor right now, but if anybody takes it seriously enough to look into it… there’s going to be a lot of concerned parties, if you catch my drift.” Like the delegates from the Hosnian system, Rey thinks. She feels cold.

“I understand,” Rey says. Poe sighs. 

“I’m not saying there’s going to be a—tribunal, or even a hearing or anything. Not yet. And maybe never, considering what a mess the records are. But… have you thought hard about what keeping this guy around means?”

“Poe,” she says. 

“Yeah, I know,” he says, and throws his hands up. “I know, he’s the—other half of your soul, or your… dyad,” Poe says, with a face like he’s tasting backwash from a watering hole. “I know he was brainwashed, or turned or whatever, Finn’s tried to explain, I know the three of you hashed this out somehow with your whole... shared force hivemind thing, but it still makes no sense to me. I will admit, reluctantly, that having him join the base raids was a good idea. There, I said it, are you happy?” Rey nods. “I still just feel like… I still feel insane, okay? I feel insane over this sometimes.”

“You think you’re the only one?” Rey says, her eyebrows lifting. 

“Yeah, but you’re a Jedi,” Poe says. “You actually get to tune into the mystical part. I just get to sit here on the sidelines and wonder what the kark is going to happen next.”

“You should talk to Leia,” Rey says, and Poe’s dry smile fades. “No, that wasn’t—I’m not trying to make a joke,” she says. “I mean it. There are ways, even if someone’s not—attuned to things, the way Finn and I are. There are ways. Dream-walking. With a little help. I know it’s possible, I’ve been reading about it. I would help you, if you wanted. I know she’d want to talk to you.” Rey smiles. “And every truly great pilot is a little force-touched, you know that.”

“Uh-huh,” Poe says. “Butter me up, so I look the other way for your Sith-dropout boyfriend. I see how it is.” Rey leans her head on his shoulder and Poe slings an arm around her. “Just please, tell me you know what you’re doing.”

“I really don’t.”

“Great,” Poe says. “Wonderful. Well, that makes all of us.”

 _Rey,_ Ben’s voice cuts in, suddenly. Urgently. _Finn—_

And then she feels it too, a wave of it, surprise and pain and longing, an overpowering burst of emotion that goes out from Finn’s heart to hers like an arrow. Rey gasps and lets go of Poe and just—runs. _Finn got a comm, he needs you,_ Ben finishes, inside her head, and she flickers an affirmation back to him as she’s sprinting full-tilt down the hill, arms pumping, heart thudding hard in her chest. Rey hurtles down from their dirt landing pad and leaps the little stone wall that rings the huts, and finds Finn sitting crouched with his back against the big hut, hands over his face, like he sank down there and couldn’t get up again. He’s crying silently; Rey runs to him and throws her arms around him and he grabs onto her. 

“I have,” Finn says, and inhales shakily. “I have a mother,” Finn says, “I have a mother,” and he breaks, and Rey holds him, holds him tight, presses her face into his back. Her eyes well with tears. When she looks up for a second she can see Ben standing awkwardly at the far side of the hut, still holding onto a rake. 

“Finn,” Poe says, behind them. He’s coming up across the grass, panting. “Hey, what happened?” Finn wipes his face and sits up a little; Rey doesn’t quite let him go. He looks up at Poe and then his expression crumples again, and he can’t speak, and Poe just kneels down next to Rey and wraps his arms around them both. Rey leans her cheek against Finn’s head. “You’re alright,” Poe says, tenderly, bewildered. “Hey, sweetheart, you’re alright.”

It’ll take Finn a week or so to make the trip out to Abafar and back; once they’re in the system it might take a little work to locate the little mining colony his mother’s apparently been living in for the last few years. And he’s not going alone: Lando and Jannah and Chewie are taking him in the Falcon. They’ve been making runs like this for other families: a couple of the people in Jannah’s old crew, a few of the early defectors who’ve been doing some research on their own. Rey wanted to go with him, but their first new arrival has already messaged and said they’re on their way. It’s an older woman from Dantooine who’s been moving pots with her mind since she was a child, but only recently has been having lucid dreams of Yavin, of walking through the meadows and along the lake paths, talking to Rey in her sleep. Every time Rey listens to her message again she feels lightheaded.

“Hey,” Finn says, when Rey’s still hanging onto him at the bottom of the ramp, long after Chewie’s started the flight checks. “I told you, it’s okay. I meant it. I want you to stay. Yelleh’s going to be your first real student.”

“No she’s not,” Rey says, into his collar. “You were.”

“I like to think I was more of a co-pilot,” Finn says, and Rey swats at him, and they laugh together, and Rey finally lets him go. He’s glowing inside, Rey thinks. She’s so happy for him. She feels like she’s glowing, too.

“You’re right,” she says. “We’ve done all this together. They’ll be our students, really. Both of ours.”

“You saying I’m a Jedi Master now, too?”

“Congratulations,” Rey shrugs, grinning, and Finn laughs so hard she has to clap him on the back. He gives her a final hug and then goes up the ramp, pumping his fist. Rey thinks of Leia for a second, remembers asking _is that really how this works_? It feels so long ago, and also like yesterday. Maybe this is what it really means to be a learner, after all. 

“Jedi Master coming through!” Finn calls, as he disappears past the rising ramp. Rey can hear Chewie roaring from down the hall. “Hey! I understood that!”

They take off just after sunset; Rey watches until they’re a pinprick in the distance and then goes to find a blanket. She takes it and climbs up onto the roof of the big hut, where Ben is already sitting with his long legs drawn up, his arms resting on his knees. Rey puts one end of the blanket over his shoulders and wraps herself in the other half. Ben slides his arm around her waist and she leans over into the solid warmth of him, and sighs. 

“I’m nervous,” she says, after a while. Ben leans his cheek against the top of her head. “What if I’m not much of a teacher?”

“You will be.”

“How do you know?”

“Are you saying I don’t have a basis for comparison?”

“—no,” Rey says. She shifts a little. “Not exactly.”

“You’re probably right,” Ben says. “But I do know your students will be happy here.”

Rey hums against him, thoughtful

“What about you?”

“You’ve asked me that before,” he says, gently. She has. She asked him on the way back from Exogal, and again before they landed, and again after they’d spent the first few nights there alone, in the furthest little hut, clinging to each other through their nightmares. Every time he’d told her the same thing: that it didn’t matter to him where he was, as long as he was with her. 

“Yes, but,” says Rey. “I just need to know if you’re—enduring it, or something,” she says. “If you think you could ever be happy here. Or if it’s just going to bring up… bad memories, forever. There are other places.” Ben kisses the top of her head. He doesn’t answer for a while. She can feel him thinking. Rey closes her eyes and waits. 

“I was happy here, sometimes,” he says, finally. “I was lonely. I didn’t make friends. I was angry at everyone I knew. And every time I got angry, every time I—failed, every night when I closed my eyes, I heard—” he says, but he doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to, for her. He’s quiet again for a long time. “But I was still happy here. I liked going down to the lake and skipping stones as far as I could see. I like the caverns in the yellow hills.”

“There are caverns in the yellow hills?” Rey interrupts. “Oh, sorry.” Ben stifles a smile in her hair. 

“I’ll take you there,” he says. “There’s quartz and chromite all through them, if you shine a light up,” he says, and instead of describing it he just sends her a picture: a frozen moment in a glittering cave, the ceiling studded with countless refractions, like a sky of stars. 

_Beautiful,_ Rey thinks. 

“It’s a good place,” he says. “You’re right about it. Yavin was always a good place.” He gathers the blanket closer around her. “Even I couldn’t ruin it forever.”

“Ben.”

“I know I don’t deserve this place,” he says. She opens her mouth. “No, Rey, I don’t. And I know I don’t deserve you.” Rey tightens her arm around him. 

“Good thing you’re not in charge of me, then,” she mutters.

“I know it’s a gift,” he says. He sends her another picture: this time he shows her herself, as he’s seen her through their bond, her face lit by the blade of her saber. Radiant and determined, trusting in him. A wellspring of fierce love that’s almost blinding. Rey can’t speak. “I’ll try to be worthy of it, someday,” he says. 

Ben holds her until she falls asleep, and in her dreams that night she is in the cavern again, but lightless and fumbling, until his hand slides into hers. They go out together into the yellow hills, into daylight, and walk the flower fields of the valley, up towards the temple. The tall grass brushes her thighs. In the distance there’s smoke rising from cooking fires, and the smell of bread, and the sound of laughter, and a dark-haired child silhouetted in the light, waving a tiny arm over their head in excitement. Rey smiles upward and her heart lifts. She looks at Ben, still holding her hand, and Ben looks at her. 

_Last one to breakfast is a mudhorn egg,_ he says, and in her dream Rey laughs, and starts to run.

.


End file.
